Identity Documents Bill

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I think I am the last speaker before the gap, unless the Cross Benchers have finally achieved the status of being a recognised bloc with the right to have a speaker after the gap. That would be a wonderful way forward, because we might get further rights as well.

I have a few comments about the Bill. I welcome it very much, particularly because it perhaps indicates that this Government are taking a much more libertarian approach than their predecessor. Many people have asked why it all came about. The trouble is that socialists believe in central control because the state should be running everything while capitalists like to know everything about their customers, and to both the individual is a bit of a nuisance. Out of that grows the idea that we can sort it all out centrally.

To me, the national identity register was the objectionable part. I did not have a problem with a bit of plastic with a picture on it, replicating the “chip page”, as I think of it—that bit in the passport. It is rather sad in some ways that, having started issuing those, you could not have just that to slip into your pocket when you go over to France. It would have no greater authenticity than a passport, but you could use it for countries that did not have a visa requirement or need to stamp something in your pages; it would be waterproof, which would solve the problem of the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon; and it need not cost very much more because no other information would be gathered to produce it—it would just be a bit of plastic, produced in quantity for probably an extra £3 or £5. But we will not worry about that for the moment.

Everyone has said pretty much everything that can be said about this topic, so I would like to reinforce a couple of points and think about wider purposes and other points, so the Government might see where they could improve things elsewhere. The real problem that I have with all these great central databases is simple; Hitler was elected and got into power quite legally. Someone said to me years ago, “How do you break into Fort Knox?”. The answer is, “You steal the key”. If you get yourself elected to power in a democracy, eventually you have all the power to get at these things and there is no way of resisting it. Parliament has total sovereignty, and so some future Parliament can open up whatever security locks and controls you put on a database—unless, fortunately, you have some disobedient civil servants further down who ensure that the greater powers do not get to know about it or destroy the thing first.

I shall start the other way around. You may think that you have nothing to hide, but how accurate is the information? I do not have a problem with the powers in Clause 10 on credit checking, credit reference agencies and other things like that, but my one caveat is that the data are not accurate. But then the government data in these large databases are already inaccurate; when they have been audited, they have often been found to have a lot of errors in them. This is one of the troubles, and it is my lesson for the Government elsewhere; it is difficult to link up and reconcile large government databases. That is why the process gets very expensive, and then certain large consultancies—the usual big seven, eight or nine of them, which are generally American-owned, so they remove British taxpayers’ money to give it to their owners in America—will make an awful lot of money advising us on how to do it and the job will spin on for ever, as we have seen with certain other database projects.

The other thing about the cancellation of the scheme is that the Government have learnt a lot so far in trying to introduce it, and that knowledge has been useful. At the end of the day, the Government have a requirement for strong authentication of people’s identity in certain areas—think of simple things like security at the Ministry of Defence or access to government establishments all over the place. That will need to be retained, but you do not need a national ID card scheme to do that; that is just normal business practice. One of the groups that I sit on at the moment, an offshoot of a parliamentary group, is looking at the interoperability of identity card schemes among allies and internationally, as well as just in the UK. That is the sort of thing that we should be doing because therein can lie some cost savings, although there are a lot of complications with that, which I am not going to go into here.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has produced an excellent report, its second of the 2010-11 Session: Legislative Scrutiny: Identity Documents Bill. It has some extremely good analysis in it. I draw attention to the section on non-EEA biometric immigration documents; perhaps we could save some money there, too. I realise that we need to have a biometric system to “deduplicate” people who make repeated applications to enter, or who try to falsify and get other people in under their original documents and so on, but are we actually gathering more information than we need? Do we think that we are trying to build this into a database of foreign residents because we think that more terrorists come into this country than we grow at home? We ought to look at the effectiveness of this before we gather too much information.

I also get worried about the exchange of information with other countries on how much is needed and how much is not. Is there some vulnerability regarding travel?

I should like to say something about purpose, in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Maxton. Identity cards are not designed to work online, so they will be useless when it comes to making transactions over the internet. There is a huge liability issue; if you use the card for financial or contractual purposes, where does the liability lie? The Government certainly were not going to accept liability, and other organisations will not accept a contract if there is not some liability in the proof of identity. This is what organisations such as the notaries—the notary public—and the scriveners provide.

Credit card fraud, which is often called identity theft but really just involves the theft of a credit card to try to steal money, is very different from impersonating someone. It is up to the banks to sort it out—it is their liability. They could easily increase the security of those tokens if they wanted to. They have chosen one of the cheaper routes—they use even less expensive routes abroad—because there is a balance between the cost and the amount of money they lose. They should really be using two-factor, preferably two-channel, authentication, and some are beginning to do it. It is not difficult to do, and if the incentive is there they will do it, but we must not confuse financial liability with the Government’s identity card scheme or passports.

Another issue that sometimes comes up is counting people in and out of the country. This is the great dream of the UK Border Agency—the passenger name record. We count everyone in and we count everyone out, and we prove who went in and who went out. Some people say that we need the identity card for that, but so what? At the end of the year we tot it all up and find that 100,000 people have stayed. We might even know who they are or what they are called because they have foreign passports. How do we find them without having to do a cordon and search and without rounding them up? How do we then get them back home? Where will we keep them in the mean time? We know all these problems, and it is not realistic. Maybe we could save a bit of money on not counting people in and out of the country. It is a pretty pointless exercise; we get very gloomy when we see how many people want to stay. If incentives are in the right place, people will go abroad while good people will stay and help the economy. We do not want to discourage people from moving across borders. That issue is for a debate on immigration at a later time, but it crosses over into the identity debate.

Like others, I have reservations about the duplication of the provisions of the Fraud Act 2006 on possessing identity documents that belong to other people. We must be very careful that we do not simply create more powers. There is great confusion between the different Acts, and those powers will get misused if there is any ambiguity at all. I am not sure how necessary they are.

I think that we should probably offer the £30 refund to all people who have cards already—it would be a good PR exercise. I would advise a lot of them not to return the cards but to keep them; they will be worth some money one day as a collector’s item—unless, of course, it is illegal under the fraud provisions.