Identity Documents Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I share the disquiet of many who have already spoken. I urge the Government to think again about this.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

The point I was answering before noble Lords intervened was the inference somehow that we are inflicting great hardship on cardholders. We do not believe this to be the case.

We do not believe that the statutory basis of the issue of ID cards creates a contract or anything akin to a contract in relations between the Secretary of State and the cardholder. Remedies that would be available in the courts if the contract were governed by the law of contract or consumer legislation—which I think is the point raised by the noble Lord—is not available for identity cards.

One or two noble Lords have raised the issue of compromise and of whether it would be a good idea to have one. Could we not, for instance, set the cost of this against the cost of the next passport or, indeed, use the lifetime for which the present card was available? There are associated problems. I do not want to detain the House extensively on this, but the fact of the matter is that the two databases—that is to say, the identity register and the passport database—are not the same. They contain different information, issued for different purposes; their legislative frameworks for what you pay are also different. We cannot therefore simply transfer the one across from the other.

That construction of two differently governed databases with different information on them was the construction of the legislation put through by our predecessors. Unfortunately, in addition to that we are going to destroy the database. We would otherwise have the continuing cost of maintaining it. That is why it cannot be regarded as a valid document for its lifetime; there is nothing behind it against which anybody needing to check your identity would validly be able so to do. There is a problem in that it simply is not a useful document any longer.

[Lord Deben]

I understand that there may be technical reasons why my proposal does not work, but surely they do not apply to the question of a passport. If you sent your form in, it would be quite clear from all the other documents that that little card was for the same person who sent in the form. You do not have to look it up on the two databases; you just know that that is one of the cases in which they could have £30 off. I do not see that that costs anything at all.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

I am sorry; I thought that the noble Lord was suggesting that this card should be available for use during its previously indicated lifetime. It is of course a separate issue as to whether you could ask for a refund. There are many problems about the refund issue, one of which is that we would have to verify whether the person presenting a card was actually entitled to that refund, which would mean referring to the database. We would have to notify everybody. The costs involved—