Identity Documents Bill

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, we come to an important amendment, which I hope the Minister will be prepared to accept, to do right by those members of the public who in good faith purchased an ID card. The introduction of ID cards was controversial and subject to intense debate in your Lordships' House. We on this side saw the ID card scheme as a convenient and secure way of asserting one’s identity in everyday life. The card was more affordable than a passport and functioned as a valid travel document throughout Europe, and we saw it as a way of demonstrating eligibility to work and as proof of age for young people or those without a driving licence. The parties opposite disagreed with that principle and in their election manifestos argued for abolition of the cards. For that reason, we have not at any stage sought to oppose the Bill, although in Committee we tabled some probing and constructive amendments, including this one.

The point of my amendment is this. As a result of the introduction of ID cards, 12,000 or so members of the public purchased a card for £30. The cards were for a period of 10 years. As a result of the Bill, should it successfully pass, the cards are to be cancelled within a short time, many years before their due expiry date. That is fair enough; it is a decision of the Government and is why they have brought this legislation to your Lordships' House. What is not fair is the Government’s decision to refuse to refund the £30 to those who purchased an ID card.

I have been rather disappointed by the Minister’s somewhat unsympathetic attitude. On Second Reading, she said:

“We realise that some people who spent £30 for a card with a 10-year life expectancy will be disappointed that it will be cancelled later this year without any refund, but those who chose to buy a card did so in the full knowledge of the unambiguous statements by the coalition parties that the scheme would be scrapped if we came to office. They cannot now expect taxpayers to bail them out”.

She went on to say that,

“citizens have to be aware of what is going on around them. It was clear that this scheme would have a risky future ahead of it”.—[Official Report, 18/10/10; col. 715.]

She then dismissed the potential refund of £30 as,

“rather less than probably most people pay for a monthly subscription to Sky”.—[Official Report, 18/10/10; col. 742.]

The Minister seemed to be saying that members of the public are meant to have a thorough understanding of the views of political parties, make an assessment of who is going to win an election and then make their dispositions accordingly.

[Baroness Hamwee]

I am confused—I do not know whether other noble Lords are. Is the noble Lord speaking to the first and third amendments?

[A noble Lord]

It is Amendment 2.

[Baroness Hamwee]

I did not hear because of the kerfuffle.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

In the flurry of Members leaving, the noble Baroness may have missed that my noble friend Lord Brett did not move the first group. I am talking about Amendment 2.

Even if you were to accept that argument, which I do not, the fact is that there were mixed messages. I shall read an extract from the Daily Telegraph of 24 May 2010:

“Chris Grayling, the former shadow home secretary, had signalled that there would be refunds for cancelled cards”.

So even if you accept the argument that members of the public were meant to read the newspapers to get an understanding of what the opposition parties were saying would happen with ID cards in the event that they won—that even though a member of the public had bought a card for 10 years, it was tough luck—the fact is that the position was not clear in the media and there were conflicting statements.

I encourage noble Lords to think about the wider principle, not just about ID cards and £30. An incoming Government are saying that because they disagreed with the original policy of a previous Government, it is simply tough luck that members of the public decided to act on that policy. They are simply expected to have this right taken away from them without any possible compensation or recompense at all. I think that that is a rather extraordinary principle to adopt. I also think that it impacts on the reputation of governments as a whole. Does the Minister not see that, in refusing to refund the £30, she is really developing a new principle which can only reduce trust in government generally?

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[Lord Deben]

Perhaps I might concentrate on why people bought the card in the place. If they bought it, as it seems, for a purpose, and that purpose no longer obtains, there is no doubt that we are taking away something from them. Surely, therefore, the answer is not to recompense them but to enable them to continue for the period of the card’s validity to be able to do what it is they bought the card for in the first place. That is a sensible and proper way of doing it. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay—though I may express myself in less elevated language—I feel that the public have every reason to believe that, if they buy something from the Government for a period of time, they should be able to continue to use it in that way. Whereas recompense is an expensive and untidy way of doing it, I really do not see why they cannot go on using it for the time that they were supposed to use it for.

[Baroness Hamwee]

I must apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for interrupting him. I think that the technical term for what was going on around here is “kerfuffle”.

I will not pretend that I have not been troubled by this issue. I am not persuaded by arguments that members of the public should have read the manifestos, certainly not in the detail that might have been expected, nor that they could have predicted the outcome of the general election. I am being told that everybody should have been reading the manifestos, but we leave it to the press to summarise them. However, the debate in Committee was about fine detail in the manifestos, and I do not think that that should be used as the basis—certainly not the only basis—for the Government’s argument.

My view is that this issue is finely balanced between taxpayers and individual cardholders. It is not the same as a consumer situation where there are two parties, the supplier of goods and the purchaser of goods. There are three parties, and the third party is the taxpayer. I understand the point that this is a comparatively small sum of money, but comparatively small sums have more value than they did a year or two ago.

The point has been made about whether this would be expropriation. That point was not taken up by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. No doubt the Minister will say something about that. I hope, too, that she will say what would be required if the cards were to go on having a use. As I understand it, it would still be necessary to retain the register. Otherwise, the cards are pieces of plastic that do not relate to anything. Quite apart from our objection to the offensiveness of the register, the cost and perhaps the confusion of retaining the register would be issues.

[Lord Vinson]

My Lords, I am sorry to speak from this side against the clause, but I believe that it is morally indefensible. It is not just that it is a small sum of money, so it is particularly stupid not to pay it, but, as has been said, this sort of thing does the Government—any Government, those of the ruling political class—absolutely no good. The public will say, “They are just not to be trusted. They just can’t do things fairly”. Whoever was the civil servant and others who put up the suggestion that this money should not be compensated or that the card should not be used, I beg them to think again. We really cannot endorse something as shabby as this.

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[Lord Rosser]

We are not actually on Amendment 4. I have been speaking to Amendment 5.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, perhaps the Minister could confirm that he would be happier—I am not quite sure that I took this from his speech—for such lessons as there may be from a relatively short and limited experience to be included in the wider work that the Government are doing. Of course, one would not disagree that any available lessons should be learnt; but I doubt whether that work is as useful to Parliament if it is provided separately and discreetly from other work being done on cyber crime and related areas. It is an enormously important area and Parliament will look forward to debating it further. I am not convinced that this is precisely the way to go.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, at Second Reading of this Bill, I suggested that, while at the moment an identity card would not help to stop fraud on the internet, it will come. There will eventually come a point when, in view of the rising number of people purchasing goods and services online, the banks and the people selling goods will insist that there is some form of identity involved in the transaction. Whether it will be putting a card into your computer or a camera that will show that you actually are the person, I do not know, but I would think the banks in particular will insist on this in the longer run, both for their own hole-in-the-wall cash machines and for buying online. The ID card, as it was originally proposed, if it had been made compulsory from the word go, as I wanted it to be, would have been one of the answers to that and would have saved the private sector very considerable sums of money in the long run.

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[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, if I had got my act together a bit more quickly, I would have added my name to the amendment, because it is very sensible. There are some residual powers in the Bill which we need to keep an eye on. Although an Information Commissioner exists, he does not have the power to march in and look at things unless there are complaints. He would also be overextended.

We need to look out for residual powers that could give rise to concern. They come in Clause 10. Subsections (8) and (9) sensibly state that certain information which is gathered to prove someone’s identity when a passport is being issued should be destroyed after 28 days. Given that the Government will destroy the information within 28 days, I am happy for them to consult other databases—I mentioned in Committee electricity bills, which is probably the quickest way of finding whether someone has changed address or where they really are. I have no problem with the Government doing that to verify a person’s identity for the purpose of producing a passport.

However, then we get to subsection (10), which is the good old catch-all. It says that the Government can retain the information beyond 28 days for the purpose of “preventing or detecting crime”—I remember this sort of wording in RIPA, which led to a lot of grief—and “apprehending and prosecuting offenders”. Well, that depends on how quickly they apprehend them again. We should have oversight by an outside commissioner who reports to Parliament and not by a Home Secretary, because this sort of thing can get out of hand and, later, suddenly rise up to bite a Government in the future. We have several commissioners doing this sort of job elsewhere in the security world. We either add it on to someone’s job or create another one, but it is sensible for protecting the public.

[Baroness Hamwee]

In Committee I raised the point on subsection (10) to which the noble Lord referred. Is it the noble Earl or the noble Lord?

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, it is the noble Earl. It is very confusing. I am actually the Earl of Erroll, but we are in distinguished company as we have two Earls who have surnames as their titles—Earl Ferrers and Earl Attlee. However, I would still refer to them as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers. Thank you very much for correcting the House on this.

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[Baroness Hamwee]

In Committee I raised the issues on subsection (10) to which reference has just been made, and I did so for the same reasons—the concerns about, for instance, judicial oversight of a Secretary of State’s decision to retain information for these purposes. I was told then that subsection (10) reflects the provision in the Data Protection Act. I went away and looked at that, and I ought to say thank you. I was entirely happy that although the wording is a little different, it amounts to precisely the same thing. That is not to say that the issue is entirely satisfactorily dealt with. Perhaps it should be dealt with in a different way in this piece of legislation or, as I would like to see, more widely. However, I think that that is a different point.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, the Earl Ferrers, to our debates on—