Identity Documents Bill

John Hemming Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

I congratulate you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on your well-deserved appointment, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on her excellent maiden speech.

I support the Identity Documents Bill, but one of the difficulties is that it should really be called the Identity Documents and Register Bill. It is the register aspect that I would like to concentrate on. Section 10 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 deals with

“Notification of changes affecting accuracy of Register”.

The claim that maintaining a database and any changes to it has no cost is ludicrous. There is obviously a saving from not having to change the database.

Under section 10(1):

“An individual to whom an ID card has been issued must notify the Secretary of State about…every prescribed change of circumstances affecting the information recorded about him in the Register”.

Under section 10(7):

“An individual who contravenes a requirement imposed on him by…this section shall be liable to a civil penalty not exceeding £1,000.”

Essentially, what that means is that once the information dealt with in schedule 1 is on the register, anyone who has an ID card—whether they are compulsory or not—is under a duty to notify and will be fined up to £1,000 if they do not inform the Government of those changes. Perhaps that was the stealth tax that was going to get the Government out of the financial mess the country was in. If we are talking about £1,000 fines for 60 million people, that comes to £60 billion, which is a good start: there is a third of the deficit gone. The reality is that all the debate, on the basis of which public opinion was formed, has been about the card and its cost. Once people start being fined for not telling the Government about changes, the position becomes much more difficult.

Schedule 1 of the 2006 Act is relevant to the subject of the 50 pieces of information, although the amount of information required obviously depends on the individual. The requirement for the individual’s “full name” is straightforward, but people change their names by deed poll from time to time, and if they do not tell the Government, they must pay a £1,000 fine. Next, the schedule refers to

“other names by which he is…known”.

People may have nicknames. If someone fills in an election nomination paper with a name by which he is known, but does not tell the Government for the purposes of the identity card, he will have to pay a £1,000 fine.

There are requirements for “date of birth” , “place of birth” and “gender” to be recorded. “Gender” is an interesting one. Under the Identity Cards Act 2006 (Application and Issue of ID Card and Notification of Changes) Regulations 2009, people can register two genders if they wish. I shall say more about that later.

The schedule also refers to

“the address of his principal place of residence”.

To be fair, people do need to tell the various authorities where they live, for electoral purposes and the like. However, paragraph 1(g) refers to

“the address of every other place in the United Kingdom or elsewhere”.

Someone with a holiday home in France must tell the United Kingdom Government where it is. If he sells it and does not tell the Government where he has moved, he will have to pay a £1,000 fine. It is a good way of raising money. A great many people, including many in the House, have more than one residence—they may have to work away from home—but if they do not tell the Government where that other residence is, they must pay £1,000.

The schedule demands

“a photograph of his head and shoulders (showing the features of the face)”.

The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and my hon. Friends the Members for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) may wake up one day and decide that they would like to use the razor to a greater extent than usual. If they take such action and do not tell the Government, they must pay a £1,000 fine for not sending another photograph.

The passport system is simple and straightforward. Every 10 years, people must renew their passports and send in a new photograph. At one stage the Government got into a real mess with babies. They required a baby not to have its mouth open when being photographed, and people had to send in 20 photographs before one was considered acceptable. That was a serious problem. Under the ID card system, such people would fall outside the time limits specified in section 10 of the Act, and would have to pay a £1,000 fine.

My daughter decided to dye her hair green. Obviously that is a change, involving not just the price of the dye but a possible £1,000 fine for dyeing her hair green and not telling the Government. Let us suppose that I decide tomorrow to put on a dress and call myself Doris. The statutory instrument requires me to tell the Government that I am calling myself Doris and have an alternative gender. If the day after that I decide to call myself Ethel and do not tell the Government, I will have to pay a £1,000 fine. The Government are definitely making good progress in getting rid of the deficit: this is a very good stealth tax.

It is all a question of whether the Government serve the citizen or the citizen serves the Government. One of my constituents was stopped by the police on the Coventry road, which—as those who are acquainted with Yardley will know—is a very big road that, unsurprisingly, leads to Coventry. Everything, including his insurance, was perfect, but the wrong box was ticked on a form, and he was subsequently prosecuted and convicted of an offence that he had not committed. It took a lot of doing for us to reverse the conviction and remove it from the system. That is an example of what can happen when things are done for the convenience of the state rather than the convenience of the citizen. The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) said that this was not Big Brother, but I think that having to tell the Government every time one does something is a bit like Big Brother.

During the general election campaign I cut my finger on a piece of paper, and obviously that changed my fingerprint. Schedule 1.2 is headed “Identifying information”, and subparagraph (c) refers to fingerprints. If I had had an ID card and had not told the Government that I had cut my finger, I would have had to pay a £1,000 fine. Members may laugh, but such things happen. The purpose of speed cameras was to make money out of the fines. If a Department is targeted to be self-financing, it will look for solutions such as another change that should have been, but has not been, put on the identity card register.

There is no point in my reading out all of schedule 1, which is available to Members, as are the regulations which amend schedule 1. More than 50 pieces of information may be required, but the main issue is the sudden creation of a major duty for the citizen to tell the Government everything that he or she does. We all know how good the Government are at keeping information secure. They can get a little memory stick and lose a number of bank accounts, for instance. There is also the question of access to the information. The Data Protection Act may make it an offence to sell access to any of the databases, but when there is a single database in a single place all the information is tidily collated, and it may be worth someone’s while to obtain and pass to someone else information such as where a holiday home is in France, what name a person uses when wearing a dress, the colour of a person’s hair, or a national insurance number.

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

I am the proud owner of an ID card, and I went through the process of filling in the application form. Yes, I did give information such as my name and address, but there were huge parts of the form that I did not have to fill in, because I had already provided that information in order to obtain my passport. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that we should not give such information in order to obtain a passport?

[John Hemming]

When we apply for a passport, every 10 years, we provide a new photograph. I, for example, am a little bit follicly challenged, and at some stage I must recognise that.

[Mr Watson]

Shave it off then.

[John Hemming]

If I follow the hon. Gentleman’s advice and shave it off, and then do not provide a photograph for the ID register, I will pay a £1,000 fine.

It is recognised that passport photographs go out of date. That is why children’s passports do not last as long as adults’ passports. But, having applied for a passport, we do not have a duty to tell the passport office that we have moved to a new address, or that the location of a second home has changed. There will be no £1,000 fine in such circumstances. The real difference is that individual citizens are threatened with a fine of up to £1,000 if they do not inform the Government’s ID card department of such changes. It could be said that the most intrusive aspect is not the ID card itself, but the maintenance of the register and, in particular, the duty for the individual to update the register.

I think that all the other aspects have been ably dealt with. A voluntary scheme is unlikely to achieve anything in terms of preventing crime, particularly serious crime. People who are willing to die in the process of committing crime will not be frightened of a £1,000 fine for not giving a photograph of themselves to the Government. We have heard no good arguments for how ID cards and the ID database would prevent crime. What is clear is that the identity register is massively intrusive. The duty that it places on the citizen to inform the Government of every change is an extreme step, forcing people to serve the Government and make things convenient for them by providing such information. It is obvious that this is all about convenience in the provision of services. The public interest is defined as the achievement of more efficiency in providing public services. The basic point is that the Government are here to serve the citizen; the citizen is not here to serve the Government.