Identity Documents Bill

Lord Brett Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Brett]

1: Clause 2, page 1, line 17, leave out from “day” to end of line 12 on page 2 and insert “will remain valid as a travel document in Europe until their expiry date”

[Lord Brett]

My Lords, this amendment seeks to retain one part that is enshrined in the law of the 2006 Act; that is, the use of the identity card as a travel document. Identity cards are not a unique phenomena known only in the UK, although you might have thought that from some of the external non-parliamentary criticism some time ago. Across the whole of the European Union, they are the norm rather than the exception. All countries in the EU except Ireland and Denmark have them. Ironically, Denmark, although it does not have ID cards, maintains a national identity register. However, this amendment is solely about travel. This is an issue that caused no controversy whatever before the Bill was introduced, while it was being discussed or after it was passed.

Amendment 2 is simply a mechanism for achieving the aims of Amendment 1; namely, the right of the holders of ID cards to use them as travel documents for the duration of their validity. Given the lack of controversy over this aspect of the Identity Cards Act, there can be no ideological argument against retaining them. The case put forward in the other place for not retaining them was based on technical issues and, in particular, cost issues which, given the Government’s refusal even to offer refunds, must be the most relevant and pressing matter for them.

More than 13,000 ID cards were issued in the UK. However, these are not the only cards containing a UK emblem. The many British residents in Gibraltar are issued with ID cards which are accepted as valid travel documents throughout the EU and the EEA, which includes countries such as Switzerland. I understand that these are issued and maintained at relatively minimal cost. I should like to ask the Minister particularly whether the Government, through the Home Office or the IPS, have consulted the Government of Gibraltar on their experience of ID cards, the processes they use and the costs in this regard. In Europe, the use of ID cards as travel documents is not limited to Gibraltar. Germany, Sweden and a number of other countries, both EU member states and candidate member states, already use ID cards as travel documents.

Among the aggrieved citizens who have approached me and other Members of your Lordships’ House with concerns about being unable to use the ID card as a travel document are, in particular, elderly people who restrict their travel to Europe because of age and insurance issues and business people who frequently travel to Europe. For example, a gentleman from Kent has travelled to mainland Europe—as we used to call it—some 30 times since getting his ID card earlier this year. He values it very highly and does not like the idea of having to carry a passport, which will inevitably get damaged by constant use, while he can have an ID card that fits in his wallet.

For those reasons, and setting aside all the other arguments for or against ID cards, I believe that they should be retained for those who bought them as a valid, legal document. The issue is not one of ideology, and I do not believe that it can be one of cost. I hope the Government will look at the issue again with a view to extending the use of this part of the ID card as a travel document for those who bought them in the honest belief—without a particular view for or against ID cards as a security document—that they could be used as a travel document. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 1 and 4 because, as I said on Second Reading, when we discussed this matter at length, it seemed a shame to throw out the one good bit of the scheme along with the bad bit. The bad bit comprises the national identity register, whereas having another bit of plastic with which to identify yourself is not a huge concern. As I said then—I may as well put this on record again—I should be very happy to see us have a plastic passport, as you might call it, comprising the photograph page of the passport with an identical chip in it. We are told that retaining this provision temporarily as a travel document for use in Europe would give rise to huge expense as whole sections of the national identity register would have to be preserved. I do not believe that that would be the case; I think the pudding is being over-egged here in order to make the case all one way.

I support Amendment 4 in preference to Amendment 2 because the latter seems to be rather all-embracing whereas Amendment 4 is concerned merely with the information that is relevant to a passport. That information would have to be retained for a passport anyway and would probably be sufficient to prove the authenticity of the card. I have not checked with my expert but I imagine that the card is very secure and that if you are in possession of the Government’s public key you can authenticate the card without having to have any of this background information off a database, and you can tell whether the card has been cloned or tampered with in any way. Therefore, I think we should do exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Brett, suggested and retain the card as a travel document. Perhaps in due course we could also have a convenient European travel card to go along with it, but we should retain the minimum of information that is required, if any.

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[The Earl of Erroll]

I envisaged that the amendment meant that the fingerprints go, everything on the NIR is scrapped and one or two things—which might be literally just the facial biometric—are transferred to the passport to save time. That is all.

[Lord Brett]

I seem to have caused part of this confusion with my amendment. As I understood during that brief period when I was the Minister responsible for identity cards, you have the information that is on the passport database and additional points that are on the national identity register. We are scrapping the national identity register, but we are told that virtually everyone who has an ID card is on the national passport database. So, on the national passport database we need to have an indication that some individuals have an ID card as well, as a travel document. To me, that seems to be the only information that needs to be transferred from the national identity register to the database for passports. That does not sound very resource-intensive or difficult in terms of legal base. I cannot see why any other information is required to be transferred if we are getting away from a register and back to just having a passport, albeit a plastic one.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the amendment does not contain all that accompanying detail. It is not easy, therefore, to interpret what the noble Lord actually thinks should be transferred. If he wants to make that clearer, perhaps that might help, but, as things stand, these amendments have not been thought through. That is a pity because there is the germ of a good idea here. The idea of a passport card is not new, and Members of this House may be aware that—

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[Lord Brett]

I am more confused now than I was when we started. I cannot even recognise the replacement costs. But I return to the issue of database transfer. It takes only an asterisk or other symbol on the passport database to indicate that a person is using the same information on the database on a new plastic card which is valid in Europe. If the person loses the card, the cost of replacement will be the cost of the plastic card. Banks do it thousands of times a day. If the cost were remotely as much as is mentioned here then banks would be charging us very substantial sums for card transfers. We are not maintaining a database, so I do not know where the £4 million figure comes from. The passport database, which is well regarded and will continue, will indicate that this small number of people also have a plastic card which will expire on a given date.

I have another question for the noble Baroness. If she does not have the answer to hand, I would be happy to accept it in a letter. How many ID cards does the United Kingdom—the UKBA—accept, and from which countries, as travel documents? If we accept many dozens of them—I think that we are talking a score or more—and if a score or more are used internally in Europe, would it not be a good idea to use this limited number of people as a pilot or experiment to see whether there is value in a longer-term policy of issuing a travel card in Europe?

Those are my questions. I will of course withdraw the amendment, but one can expect the discussion to continue on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

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[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

No, but even if we are not, I am still fascinated to know how many of us did. I will be quite frank—I did not even read my own party’s manifesto. It was 115 pages long, for a start. However, even if we assume that people had read the party manifesto and knew that we were committed to a repeal of the scheme, there was nothing in any manifesto about repayment of the fee. Anybody reading it would, I suspect, have assumed that if the Government were going to do that, they would return the £30 that was laid out for the purchase. That is my first point.

Secondly, in the statement of the deputy director of policy of the Identity and Passport Service, which is annexed to the report of the Joint Committee on the Bill—it was a pre-scrutiny report published in the middle of October—it was made clear that, although all cardholders had been warned that the cards would be made null and void by the passage of the Bill, there was no reference to non-repayment of the fee. It is very simple: if you knew about all of this—and the vast majority of the public did not—there was still nothing about repayment of the fee.

Then we come to the argument which is to be found at page 20 of the Joint Committee report:

“Comment has been raised that the absence of a refund provision in the Bill is denying cardholders access to safeguards set out in consumer protection legislation. However, an ID card would not be considered as a consumer good. That is because the issue and the holding of an ID card are not considered to be in the nature of a consumer transaction and a sale of goods”.

That, again, comes from the deputy director of policy at the Identity and Passport Service. That is his view. As a lawyer, I am extremely dubious about the reasoning. It seems to me that there was a sale and purchase of goods; namely, a card. I do not see any reason why this should be taken out of the normal consumer protection legislation. Even if it is, surely it is bizarre for this Government, who are committed to fairness—and I am passionately committed to fairness—to resile from the general standard that prevails by law between consumers and suppliers, between purchasers and sellers, on the basis that there is no strictly narrow legal requirement under legislation to do so. Surely we should be a model and satisfy the spirit of all that consumer protection legislation.

I am sorry to have gone on but it strikes me that this is an own goal. It may be small in financial terms—£360,000 is scarcely a blink of the Treasury eyelid these days—but not in terms of the message that it sends out. I want this coalition Government to walk their talk and to act fair as well as talk fair.

[Lord Brett]

My previous confession about having read all three manifestos was somewhat of a wasted investment, given that after the weekend following the election, we had a coalition agreement. However, I recognised at Second Reading that one of the few things that appears in both the Liberal Democrat and the Conservative manifestos was the decision to scrap ID cards. I saw in neither manifesto a reference to a refund or non-refund. When I was, briefly, the Minister responsible for the launch of the scheme, I debated this with Mr Huhne of the Liberal Democrats on the radio, and while he talked about scrapping them, he was silent about the travel document. I was asked what would be the advantage of having one of these documents if the scheme were to be scrapped by the incoming party, and I said that at least they would have value for 10 years as a travel document. Mr Huhne chose not to contradict that and he certainly made no reference to refunds.

As the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said, it is a question of fairness. In the other place, the Minister of State accepted that there were people who, in these straitened times, would have the hardship of having spent the £30. He did not go on to follow his logic, which is that, if you believe in fairness, you should restore that £30 to the individual.

Leaving aside all aspects of ideology, policy and security, I believe that the reputation of this Government—and the reputation of any democratic Government of this country, irrespective of party—is worth a lot more than £360,000. I hope that the Minister will take that on board.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I did not add my name to the amendment because there was not room, but I spoke about this on Second Reading. It is absolute lunacy not to offer a refund. It could be optional, in which case, as I said, a lot of people might well then decide to keep the cards as a collector’s item and an investment for the future. The concept that we would have to spend £22 million refunding the money is, to my mind, dotty. The Government have clearly fallen into the hands of the large systems integrators again, who are siphoning off our taxpayers’ money to America. I would suggest that they deal with some British SMEs for a change, but unfortunately government procurement rules do not let us do that at the moment. That is just a quick side swipe.

Thinking about the statements of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, about consumer protection, I thought that there was also provision under the ECHR whereby Governments could not expropriate private property without compensation. I suppose that the ID card is not people’s property, but presumably there is an issue because they paid for it and were expecting something in return. If it is expropriated without compensation, I should have thought that that might be an interesting case to go further up the line—there is nothing like stirring things up a bit.

I find amusing the concept that the general public are better than the weather forecasters, all the pundits and all the experts, and can predict the outcome of the next general election several months ahead. That is wonderful. I would love to know who those members of the public are. Then there is the idea that they could also predict the coalition, the way round that it ended up, which was not expected by many people at all. For a while it was largely thought that Labour and the Liberals would end up together. Then there is each of the parties having the arrogance to say that they will have sufficient control over the next Parliament to get what they want through. This is still a democracy. Opposition parties are still supposed to have some say. I know that after a few unfortunate years under first Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair, when majorities were excessive, Governments behaved in that way. Perhaps it is good that we return to the situation where Governments do not have control over Parliament and these things have to be agreed among other people, including Cross-Benchers—who are sometimes very cross.

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[Baroness Neville-Jones]

They have, however, been written to to say that the scheme will be cancelled. The key issue is not that of a refund to the individual but how much the taxpayer is expected to pay to end this wanton scheme. We have already seen that the previous Labour Government spent £292 million on the ID scheme and the associated biometric work. That is a staggering amount for a scheme that was predicted to be self-financing through the fees, and given that only 15,000 cards are in circulation in the first year of issue, 3,000 of which were given away free anyway. The amendment’s effect is that the 12,000 cards should be given away free of charge. We cannot go on spending taxpayers’ money in this fashion, particularly when the public have shown overwhelmingly—there is no ambiguity about this—that they do not want ID cards. At the previous election, they showed their unwillingness—

[Lord Brett]

Will the noble Baroness provide the evidence to back up her conviction that the public do not want ID cards, as all the opinion polls taken by this and the previous Government do not indicate that that is the case? However, more importantly, is she saying that some people are rich enough to write off the £30 without worrying and complaining, while the people who are being punished are the poor people for whom £30 is more than they can afford, even if they can afford Sky Television? That is the logic of it.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, we do not have a socio-economic profile of those who bought cards. We have other profiles but not that one as we did not inquire about people’s incomes. However, I do not think that the public are very interested in the Government spending a further £400,000 on refunds. Unfortunately, the sum is not £360,000 as an administrative overhead is incurred in refunding the £30 fees, which themselves amount to £360,000. You might say that £400,000 is not a significant sum in the previous Government’s overall scheme of spending on ID cards. Indeed, I hear noble Lords present saying that. However, I am afraid that the Government maintain the contrary view. It is a significant amount and, frankly, noble Lords opposite have not provided a good reason why a refund should be given. Instead they accuse the coalition of being mean-spirited. If mean-spirited means extricating ourselves from an expensive failure at the least possible cost to the taxpayer, I think that we are doing the right thing. We do not accept that yet more money has to be spent on ID cards.

I am happy to ensure that the details of how we extricate ourselves from the ID card mess are placed in the public domain. As the Immigration Minister made clear on Report in the other place—I again confirm this—a Written Ministerial Statement will be made to the House on completion of the destruction process. I will place a copy of the planned destruction process referred to in the amendment in the Library.

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[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, it is certainly the Government’s intention to cancel it, assuming that Parliament gives its assent.

[Lord Brett]

My Lords, would it be helpful if a copy of that letter were placed in the Library of the House so that we could all examine it before Report?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, we will so do.

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[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, the Minister has invited the mover of the amendment to withdraw it, but that still leaves the opportunity to make a brief intervention. I did not speak at Second Reading—indeed, I was not present—but I have had the considerable privilege of listening to the whole of the debate today, except the very first words that the noble Lord, Lord Brett, uttered.

I am a mildly interested party, for quite irrelevant reasons, in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, introduced the car scrappage scheme. My car became relevant to it precisely 24 hours after the scheme ended, and I have behaved impeccably towards the noble Lord and indeed all members of the previous Government by not alluding to that fact until this very moment. I am also perhaps the only member of the Committee to be over the age of 75 and therefore entitled no longer to pay a television licence. I have always regarded that as a generous concession by the state—although you do not realise, until you have to do so, that securing it is a little like proving that you are not a money launderer.

The jury must be out on the country’s enthusiasm for the ID project. There was some reaction that the Government were wrong to suggest that it was wholly unpopular, but the fact that only 12,000 people had bought these ID cards since 2006 did not suggest an overwhelming popularity and that they would do well as a loss leader in a supermarket. I think that we can say that there is something to be said on either side of that argument.

[Lord Brett]

First, it was a phased rollout, starting in 2009 and ending in 2012-13. It was restricted to Manchester Airport, London City Airport and the area of Manchester. It would have been rolled out across the rest of the country over the period. There is also a register of applications for people in other areas who had to wait because the cards were not available, so to say that there was a take-up of only 12,000 is actually to pretend that the whole country could have applied when in fact it was very restricted.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

That is an entirely fair point, which I am happy to take. The fact remains, though, that even under the provisions that the noble Lord issues, I still stand by my statement: the figure of 12,000 does not indicate overwhelming popularity for the scheme. People were not fighting in order to get their own cards.

On the fact that compensation is available for contracts but not in different languages with regard to ID cards, presumably that occurred because the original contracts allowed for what would happen in the event of the scheme in any way being interrupted. That is the way in which contracts are usually written. I have heard everything that has been said about what this Government have not done but I notice that the previous Government, in selling the ID cards, did not appear to have built in a provision in relation to compensation calculations, perhaps for the good reason that they did not want the thought to enter the public mind that they might not be returned at the next general election and that therefore the ID scheme would be interrupted.

On the same point, I have to say quietly that although, in their rush towards modernisation, the Government were keen to remove Latin entirely from public life in this country, the phrase “caveat emptor” is presumably one that still rested in their mind when they brought in the scheme in the way that they did.

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[Lord Bach]

I think that there might be some advantages for security in this scheme, and I would like to know the Government’s view on that. From the exchanges I have been reading from, it seems that there may well have been some advantages so far as security is concerned. Indeed, I am reminded that Mr Fazackerley was asked a question by the honourable David Simpson:

“On a point of clarification, Mr Green asked Mike—

I presume that is Mr Fazackerley. I do not think that we would call an expert witness by their Christian name in this House, but perhaps I am being old-fashioned—

“a question about the fact that it takes eight to 12 weeks to carry out the security side of the process, but if a card is lost or misplaced, it can be replaced within 24 hours. Did you say that no further security checks were carried out?”.

Mr Fazackerley answered by saying:

“At that point. The benefit that we got from the system was that you were absolutely sure that the person who was standing in the pass office was the right person”. —[Official Report, Commons Public Bill Committee, 29/6/10; col. 28.]

Whether what he said about the issue goes to the question of security or not is a matter for the Committee to decide.

[Lord Brett]

My Lords, when I was involved in this, it seemed potentially to be a win-win situation. We have heard from my noble friend about the impact on airports and their ability to clear people airside for security purposes in a much shorter period. We know also that there was initial resistance from the staff, not to the detail but to the fact that the system was being made compulsory. It was only when the potential of what the system was about that the hesitation, to put it mildly, expressed by the staff turned into at least into an enthusiasm to investigate without necessarily committing to the results.

The third area is that of the airlines. The experiment was being carried out at Manchester and at London City airports, although any two airports could have been chosen. Carriers flying in and out of those airports do not have resident senior technical staff. They may have a contractor with airside passes who provides the general maintenance of an aircraft, perhaps unblocking a sensor or putting right a temperature gauge. If a more serious technical problem arises, engineers have to be brought in either from a repair facility or the headquarters of the airline involved. Those people will arrive at the airport with no airside security clearance whatever, but they cannot be allowed just to wander in and repair the aircraft. Therefore, another period of delay is built into the clearance of those individuals. However, with the provision of an identity card and the security it offered, this was another area in which a considerable advantage would have been gained for the airline industry, for passengers who could be delayed, and by making a saving in costs to airports themselves. Aircraft sitting like parked vehicles is not an advantage. At the start of the experiment, these were things that were seen to be potential advantages, so in a sense it is sad that we will not see the outcome unless the costs are exorbitant.

Let us look at the costs of aviation. A 747-400 airliner costs well in advance of £100 million, and even more modest aircraft cost tremendous sums. The daily cost of keeping an aircraft inactive is also very high. At the moment, the airline industry feels slightly battered by the costs that have been imposed by government, and this is an area where we could have formed a degree of coalition, if I may use the word, between the interests of airports, staff, passengers—we are the victims when aircraft are delayed—and the airlines themselves. I am sorry if the experiment will not be completed because there are powerful arguments for why it should be done. If not, how are we going to provide an equivalent over the coming period because, as sadly we have heard today, the problems associated with airport security are not going to go away?

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I had not intended to intervene on this amendment, but I will say two things. First, I suspect that a report before Parliament might be an unnecessary expense, but I hope that people will look at the experiences from it and incorporate them into future policies. Having heard what noble Lords have said, there seems to be confusion between nailing down a particular name or body to an identity card, and security. The trouble is that one does not know when someone goes bad. There can be a complete dissociation between issuing a pass to someone and them committing a crime. One has to go on checking whether someone has gone bad. Possession of a particular identity token does not show that someone is okay.

On the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Brett, a lot of work is going on on the interoperability of identity systems. That is the way forward. There is a body of work going on from EURIM, which is an offshoot of the parliamentary group PITCOM. It is an interesting area. The problem is that different organisations vet people for different purposes. It may be totally safe to entrust someone with the secrets of the country, but you might not want them to babysit your children—and vice versa. I note that the noble Lord is laughing. I am citing extremes here to highlight the fact that someone may be perfectly all right working in airside security, but quite dangerous in a totally different situation. We must be careful not to confuse these things and not to think that possession of a nailed-down identity card or token that shows you have been given a certain name proves that you are okay. That is the underlying problem. We should move forward, looking at the interoperability of identity systems, so that if we have to take engineers from somewhere else, we know whom we can rely on and what it is safe for them to do, and can work out how to get them through quickly. I suspect that the bigger problem is the bureaucracy involved in issuing these things. People think that that is the clever place, but it is not.

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Moved by

[Lord Brett]

12: After Clause 5, insert the following new Clause—
“Identity fraud
(1) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on the impact of the repeal of the Identity Cards Act 2006 on combating identity fraud and the lessons learnt from the operation of the identity cards scheme.
(2) The Secretary of State must lay the report before Parliament within one year of the coming into force of this Act.”

[Lord Brett]

My Lords, the contribution of the Minister in the previous debate has provided a purpose for putting down this probing amendment and, possibly, a small part of the answer. I do not think that anyone would argue the point that identity fraud is increasing. It is very troublesome for those who are victims of it, as well as for retailers and those in business who are misled into dealing with people who are not the genuine persons with whom they believed that they were dealing. The previous Government believed that the ID card was a valuable tool in that regard.

I was moved to put down this amendment by a case which shows that the identity card has great value; that is, for a person whose identity has been stolen. A colleague of mine moved flats. Someone collected the mail that was delivered later, stole the identity of the person concerned and purchased a cell phone or such like. The case was investigated, which took time and trouble, and it was resolved—except that the person was not caught. Time and again during the next two years, he or she continued to use that identity. On each occasion—whether a retailer or a utility company was involved—my colleague had great trouble going through all the rigmarole of proving her identity by supplying documentation from a number of sources. The identity card would have proved simply who she was for the benefit of anyone involved and for her own peace of mind.

We can argue the degree to which the ID card was of value in fraud detection, but I do not think that we can say that it would not have been of great help in this case of identity fraud. We know that the National Fraud Authority and our national intelligence bodies, under Home Office supervision, are looking at some form of national strategy. I presume—no doubt the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—that that is part of the review of which she spoke. This amendment seeks a commitment from the Government to tackle the growing crime of identity fraud; to evaluate, in the absence of having the identity card, what other measures need to be put in place; to learn the lessons; and to report to Parliament. That would provide, in time, a review that we can meaningfully look at in relation to what we know the identity card could have provided; and, more importantly, in its absence, to the alternatives.

It is always terrible to have your house broken into: you feel violated. It has happened again and again to this individual and it got to the stage where her health was really suffering. If nothing happened this week, her fear was that it would happen the next week. Each time it happened was that much worse. I believe that in this case, an ID card of the kind that we have in law would have helped the victim considerably. More importantly, as the Minister said, the central purpose of the legislation before us is to remove ID cards. I seek the assurances set out in this amendment, if not in the form in which they are written then at least in terms of the spirit and intention behind them.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, Amendment 19 is in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Erroll. The provision is covered by Clauses 22 and 23 of the Identity Cards Act. The only difference is that that constitutes 60 lines of legislation, with 14 subsections, whereas my amendment is infinitely more modest. I would like to think that its modesty and open-textured nature is a plus and not a minus. I well appreciate that the dismantling of the identity card scheme is not the same as its creation. Some may think that this is superfluous and that it is enough to rely on the statements that the Minister has made about what the Government may do. I take a cautious view about that. With issues of citizens’ basic rights, it is incumbent on us as legislators to be cautious. I also have in mind the fact that the noble Baroness is here today but may be gone tomorrow.

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[Baroness Neville-Jones]

The Information Commissioner needs to be satisfied that the destruction process has been proper, thorough and complete. That is why we are in touch with the Information Commissioner. We really do not see the need for yet another layer of oversight that could get in the way of the exercise of his functions. In fact, it would duplicate what he is already charged to do—effectively, I would hope.

I would also say that the Government are committed to transparency in this process. We have nothing to hide and we are absolutely committed to the citizen’s rights in the matter. While I realise that I might not last for ever—the thought of being translated to a higher place is rather worrying—nevertheless, I will say with absolute confidence that this Government, whether I am in your Lordships’ House or not, are committed to ensuring that this process is carried out properly and that there is no doubt about its integrity and thoroughness. I hope that, in the light of my comments, the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Brett]

My Lords, personally I am sure that the reference by the noble Baroness to a higher place was simply to a more senior position in the Government, if only because I am not sure that anyone who is a politician can hope to go to heaven.

I am disappointed with the Minister’s reply. I do not think that we are looking for bureaucracy in the amendment I have tabled. I believe that the Government are just as concerned as the previous Government were about issues of identity fraud and we know that things would have come from the identity card scheme that would have helped. However, it is not to be persevered with and we have been told that a plan is to be put together by the end of this year. The Bill requires a report to be made only within one year. I would have thought that, without too much bureaucracy, it would be possible to look at the extent to which the Bill will provide for those things that were provided for by the various parts of the Identity Cards Act, particularly in relation to individual identity fraud. We have seen that, online, someone’s identity might be used again and again.

So, I am disappointed, but I hope that between now and Report, the Minister will look at this again with her advisers. Transparency requires other people to be able to see something. In some ways, the only people who can report back with all the facts at their command, which we can then scrutinise, are the Government. Even at this stage, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to reconsider the matter. In the mean time, I shall withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 12 withdrawn.