Identity Documents Bill

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If the contents of the hon. Lady’s blog are germane to the debate, is it not a requirement that the House should have access to it?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Unfortunately, the blog is not a document, so that is not the case.

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[Guy Opperman]

I do not intend to go any further on that point. My final point is that we should not sign up to proposed new clause 2.

[Steve McCabe]

I, too, do not want to take too long on new clause 2 and in speaking to amendment 8. I enjoyed the contribution of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). I am going to try to find out who the 10 people in Scotland who want to join his fan club are, and I will do anything I can to put them in contact with him.

I want to acknowledge that there is one area of agreement. The Lib Dem and Conservative parties both went into the election on a promise to abolish identity cards, and we cannot really find fault with that. Of course, the Lib Dems also promised thousands of extra policemen, and I do not know where that figures in the current arrangements. However, if people are going to pray in aid that their manifesto commitment is the great justification, we need a total explanation. As far the Lib Dems are concerned, their justifications amount to nothing.

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[Mr MacShane]

It is a narrow point, but it is an important point. Since 1945, there have been many elections—although perhaps not recently—in which a party has said that if elected it would nationalise a private industry. The owners of the shares in that industry—even if the shares amounted to £20 and were bought on the day of the election—always received due compensation. We do not confiscate without some compensation. That is a very important point of British democracy.

[Steve McCabe]

There is a principle here, and that is my point. People bought these cards in good faith. It is all very well for other hon. Members to say that it was clear that if the election results went a certain way they would be abolished, but everyone—including the hon. Members for Hexham (Guy Opperman), for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) and indeed for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart)—must remember that no one won the last election. The Conservatives did not convince the electorate of the merits of their manifesto, nor did the coalition partners. That is why we have a coalition. The election result was not clear cut and no single party succeeded in convincing the electorate that they had a right to govern by itself. In that context, it would be reasonable to show a bit of humility in the proposals the Government make.

I have no objection to the Government choosing to abolish ID cards, but I do object to them seeking to penalise and punish those who bought cards in good faith. The electorate will remember all these grand speeches saying that those people do not count for anything and the derogatory remarks—although I am sure that they were made in jest—of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire. Hon. Members should recognise that those people acted in good faith and it is not appropriate to penalise them.

We do not want to make a massive deal of this, but the Minister has had quite a lot of time to think about it. We are talking about a relatively modest amount of money, but the precedent it would set is very important. If the precedent is set that people will be punished if, after having acted in good faith by doing something that the Government of the day encouraged, it will cause paralysis in many other areas.

[Mr Burley]

The hon. Gentleman said that this proposal would cost a relatively modest amount, but does he have any idea how much it would be? The current cost of maintaining the present system, as we know from Committee, would be £50 million to £60 million over 10 years. Other hon. Members have suggested migrating the data to the Passport Service, but I have no idea what that alternative proposal would cost. Does the hon. Gentleman know what the cost of maintaining the system for 11,000 people would be?

[Steve McCabe]

Fortunately, I do not suffer from the voodoo economics of Conservative Members, so I do not have a clue where the hon. Gentleman gets the figure of £50 million or £60 million. We are saying that there should be a £30 discount when the person who currently holds a card next applies for a passport. Under whichever education system hon. Members operate, they should be able to work the figure out for themselves.

I like and respect the Minister and I trust what he says, but clause 3 states that the information on the national identity register will be destroyed. It is fair to say that when this was discussed in Committee his knowledge of the technical detail of the register was almost as good as mine, and neither of us is likely to get a job with Bill Gates any time soon. We know from the information that was presented to the Committee that there is some doubt in Government and in Government organisations about what is meant by the national identity register. We cannot pass legislation in good faith and then discover that it cannot be implemented because the Minister has been asked to do something that he is not technically capable of doing.

I make this point for two reasons. First, since the election, my colleagues and I have listened to the grandstanding from the Government Benches about their civil libertarian credentials. That will work in the early months of government, when it is easy to run around saying that they are against speed cameras or DNA testing, but it will not work when they face constituents who have suffered and want to know why the Government are not on their side—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire wants to come to the defence of his new-found friends again, I will give way.

[Pete Wishart]

I just wanted to give the hon. Gentleman an opportunity to say whether he is in line with the thinking of the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who has said that the previous Government were too draconian on civil liberties. Is that an admission that the hon. Gentleman recognises?

[Steve McCabe]

Let me be blunt. I may find myself loyally serving my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband)—who knows—but I am not against ID cards. Nor would I say that the previous Government, in the circumstances with which we had to deal, were draconian. We took the difficult decisions that were necessary, and there will come a time when Ministers in this Government have to come to the House to tell us what they are having to do to protect the public because of a deterioration in our security situation. It is easy to grandstand now, but tomorrow always comes—and what is said now may come back to haunt you.

It is all very well painting a bleak picture of the previous Government, but can the Minister tell us today how the information contained on the national identity register will be destroyed? He will know that in the evidence given to the Committee the chief executive of the UK Border Agency was not entirely clear what the national identity register was. Some people thought that it was to do with facial geometry, some thought it was not. Some people thought that it was to do with a Sagem algorithm, whatever that is, and others thought that it was to do with the Cogent algorithm. One person thought that it was “co-ordinated” and another said that it is not a box with everyone’s name in it—I think we know that much.

I do not want to push the new clause to a vote, but is the Minister able to tell us today how he will comply with the requirements of clause 3? If not, will he agree to come back to the Chamber and report what has happened? The last thing that I want to do is be back here at some point in the future accusing Ministers of failing to comply with their own legislation.

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[Michael Ellis]

May I ask how many of her constituents wrote to her about this?

[Steve McCabe]

Every vote counts!

[Julie Hilling]

Especially in a marginal.

I have received letters from about a dozen people in my constituency, and as I say, they are on low incomes and are taxpayers. Each of them entered into a contract with their Government saying, “I will purchase an ID card, and for that I will have the benefit of travel within Europe and other benefits, such as proof of identity, for 10 years.” It is not unreasonable for those constituents to expect either to get their money back or to receive credit for it.

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[Mr Jackson]

It was indeed defeated, by one vote, because of the good sense of many of the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues on the then Government’s side who saw that it would not be sensible to traduce the British traditions of liberty and fairness on the back of a scare campaign from some people who were taking an authoritarian, draconian approach. To be fair and open-minded, as I aspire to be, I should say that the debate went on in my own party as well. Some Conservatives took the view that we should be tough on law and order, and that we should do the right thing and support the then Prime Minister. A small number of my colleagues voted for that proposal. I must not perambulate too far from the new clause that we are debating, but we must bear in mind that context as we listen to Labour Members’ arguments about civil liberties today. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) was absolutely right to say that, until that point, there had been a fine tradition in the Labour party of support for civil liberties.

[Steve McCabe]

I want to ask the hon. Gentleman, whom I respect, whether the best symbol of a Government’s faith in civil liberties is their support for a phone hacker in No. 10 and a Minister who spies on his own colleagues and friends—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) should carry on with the debate on the new clause.

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[Mr Jackson]

I shall speak specifically to the proposal about compensation, Mr Deputy Speaker. Please forgive me if I meandered somewhat.

There is, of course, precedent for a party being elected, putting a programme forward and sticking to its manifesto commitments without paying compensation, even at a modest level. For instance, one has to think only of the assisted places scheme, a windfall tax on utilities or the national minimum wage—they all had fiscal ramifications, but the Conservative party in opposition did not insist that there was any necessity to make specific compensation to specific groups.

[Steve McCabe]

On a minor point, this new clause is not asking for compensation per se; it asks for a reimbursement of £30 only for those who subsequently apply for a passport. It is designed to right a wrong; it is not a general request for compensation.

[Mr Jackson]

The substantive general point, which the hon. Gentleman does not want to concede, is that what is happening is a direct result of a new Government who with their coalition partner have a mandate to take a decision that has fiscal ramifications through new legislation. My point is that the precedent has been set in the past for new legislation having financial ramifications; it will inevitably affect some groups of taxpayers and voters, but the Government will not see fit to compensate them in a particular way, even on a modest scale.

Of course it is regrettable that some of the constituents of the hon. Member for Bolton West will be in a difficult position as a result of the decisions made, but I come back to the point that the two parties that form this Government won 60% of the vote on an unequivocal commitment to abolish identity cards, whereas the party that was unequivocally in favour of them comprehensively lost the election on 6 May. Although only a modest amount of money is involved, the amendment is inappropriate, particularly during a time of less than benign financial circumstances when we need to reduce the deficit.

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[Damian Green]

We have heard a festival of synthetic indignation from Labour Members over the past hour or so. We know they do not mean it because they did not even vote against the Bill on Second Reading, so they do not oppose it very hard. They are scratching around to find ways to express some opposition.

As has been amply illustrated by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), there are, however, some glimmers of light in the authoritarian dark that was the Labour Government. One or two of the leadership candidates, including the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), have said the previous Government were wrong about ID cards. The right hon. Gentleman says he thinks his party should move on from that idea. As that has been stated several times during the debate, I feel it is only fair also to record—

[Steve McCabe]

Will the Minister give way?

[Damian Green]

I will in a moment, after I have paid tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s colleague, the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), who has consistently been against identity cards. As we are mentioning the Labour party leadership candidates who are virtuous in this regard, I should mention her too, because no Labour Member did.

[Steve McCabe]

I hate to interrupt the Minister when he is in such fine flow, but I just want to suggest to him that he has misunderstood our position. This is not synthetic indignation and nobody on our side is rejecting the Government’s right to abolish ID cards—in fact, a number of us have acknowledged it. We are objecting to the mean-minded attitude that sets out to punish the relatively small number of people who bought ID cards in good faith.

[Damian Green]

The hon. Gentleman made that point, with characteristic eloquence, in his speech, and I will address it shortly. I am pleased to report to the House that, as those who sat through the Committee stage will be aware, the Labour party has come up with no new ideas to defend the ID cards scheme since then; we have heard all these arguments before.

This group of amendments, which groups together all the arguments that the Opposition can make against the Bill, is a series of impractical and expensive suggestions, made, I suspect, with varying degrees of seriousness. If I were to be kinder than I have been up to now, I might say that some of them may excite genuine feelings among Opposition Members, but others have been tabled for the sake of it.

First, I shall deal with the point raised by the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) and repeated by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) about refunds or passport-related refunds. We debated this extensively in Committee, and I recognise that £30 is a significant sum to many people, particularly those who are struggling economically in these difficult times, when the Government have had to absorb a terrible economic inheritance from their predecessor.

I do not have any data on the socio-economic status of the very small number of people who bought ID cards, nor, as far as I am aware, do any Labour Members. Before anyone stands up to ask me about this, I shall say that I do not propose to waste any public money by undertaking a survey of who they are. There are times when even those in this House need to step back and apply some common sense to the matters before them. I do not think that anyone in really difficult economic and financial circumstances would have thought, “What is the best thing to spend £30 on this week? I know, a very controversial ID card that will enable me to travel to Europe, but not anywhere else in the world. That’s the most important thing to spend my last £30 on.” I do not believe that one person in this country took that decision, and I have heard nothing from those on the Opposition Benches during our discussion of this Bill to convince me that that is any way a realistic proposition.

I further point out to the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who leads for the Labour party on this, that the charging system for ID cards introduced by her Government took no notice of the ability to pay. It set a flat fee, which took no account of whether someone was unemployed, an old-age pensioner or in full-time employment, like the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane). Sadly, he is no longer in his place, but he was asking us whether he should have claimed for his ID card on expenses. I would have thought that, at the time, that would have been a seriously terrible idea.

The only exception made on this flat fee of £30 that these allegedly struggling people were paying was for those who were in employment and working at one of the airports, where the then Government were anxious to foist the scheme on people in its early days. Anyone in that position would have been one of the 3,000 or so who were given a card free of charge. Those 3,000 lucky people—all, by definition in full-time employment—represent almost 20% of those to whom any card was ever issued. Of course, those cards were paid for by the taxpayer, so when one actually looks behind the indignation expressed by Labour Members, one does not find any substantial argument on this, which they have made the main point of their attack on this Bill.

The Government inherited an ID card scheme that has found very little favour with the public. That is a key issue. Many Opposition Members have talked about the costs, and the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) advanced the extraordinary proposition that even though he accepted that the coalition Government had the perfect right to get rid of the ID cards scheme, we should have carried on with it because the longer it went on the further the costs would be spread. That seemed to me an extraordinary attitude to parliamentary democracy. This is a key issue as the taxpayer has already paid £292 million with fewer than 15,000 cards having been issued—20% of them paid for by the taxpayer. So the calculation at the moment is that the cost to the taxpayer so far is about £20,000 per card. If we exclude the cards issued free of charge, it is £25,000 per card. That is by any standards a scandalous waste of public money that lies squarely at the door of Ministers in the previous Government.

The argument has come from the hon. Member for Easington that the scheme would have become self-financing over time. Based on public demand, there is no evidence to support that, particularly when the cost report in 2009, produced by the Labour party when it was in government, showed that a further £835 million was to be spent on ID cards by 2019, either by the taxpayer or by individual citizens having to sign up for those cards.

In the light of those facts and the already excessive spending of taxpayers’ money on an unpopular and deeply intrusive scheme, we have proposed this Bill. That is why we opposed ID cards in opposition and why we have introduced this Bill so quickly. We do not see why the taxpayer should have to pay yet again. During the debate, several of my hon. Friends asked how much the cancellation would cost, and the answer is about £400,000. As I have illustrated, enough has been spent on the scheme and the taxpayer should not face a further bill of the best part of half a million pounds. That is why we have been clear that refunds will not be offered.

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[Damian Green]

It would be slightly premature for me to give too much detail now because the legislation has not been passed. We have tried to be as clear as possible in saying that we will do it as quickly as possible after the Bill has passed through all its stages, but I do not wish unnecessarily to annoy or provoke the other place by saying anything else.

[Steve McCabe]

Can the Minister give the House a categorical assurance that all the information will be destroyed within two months of the Act passing?

[Damian Green]

The hon. Gentleman has ingeniously asked the same question as his right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, to which I shall therefore give exactly the same answer, or revert to an old parliamentary phrase and refer him to the answer I gave some moments ago. We are in contact with the Information Commissioner’s Office about the destruction process, as I have said, precisely to ensure transparency and openness about the physical destruction process.

The Chairman of the Committee made the point that I had jokingly suggested that we might have a sort of auto-da-fé of all that unnecessary information. I was only half joking when I said that and, sadly, it is not possible because the information is on various databases, so we are going to have to delete it. To answer the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak’s technical question, that is like any other act of removing information and involves deleting it from the various databases. That is why we are doing it in conjunction with the Information Commissioner. The hon. Gentleman is waving the Bill at me, so I will say that it must be done within two months of Royal Assent. The reason I cannot give the exact answer that the Chairman of the Committee wants is simply that I do not know when Royal Assent will be, but I hope that it is soon. We will then do it as soon as possible within the two months set out in the Bill. I hope that reassures the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak. There is a serious point here: if one believes, as we on the Government side do, that this information has been held unnecessarily, it is sensible to get rid of it as soon as possible, and Parliament needs to know about that.

[Steve McCabe]

rose—

[Damian Green]

Let me anticipate what the hon. Gentleman is about to ask. It has always been my intention that when that had happened, Parliament would be informed by way of a written ministerial statement about both the process and delivery of destruction. I could not be more open or transparent about this. We will do it within two months and as soon as possible after Royal Assent. When we have done it, I shall produce a written parliamentary statement that will say not only that we have done it but how we have done it. I hope that I have finally satisfied the hon. Gentleman on all those points.

On new clause 4, I suspect that hon. Members may not have considered its cost implications. There are significant costs associated with establishing whether a person wants their record to be retained, what information he or she is content to be transferred, the security and data transfer costs and, finally, future storage costs—particularly if the person does not subsequently apply for a passport. I am afraid that this is another amendment that seems intent on adding again and again to the cost of the ID card scheme. We want to scrap the scheme at minimal cost to the taxpayer. The new clause would not achieve that aim and would not remove the state’s ability to retain data without good reason.

That profligate approach is evidenced in another of the amendments before us, supported by the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South. We covered the issue of the life expectancy of the card during earlier stages of the Bill and indicated then that the cost of implementing that amendment would be between £50 million and £60 million over 10 years.

I note that the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch has not added her name to the provision, despite tabling something similar in Committee. She indicated in Committee that she thought that figure was at the top end of the estimates, but I am not sure of the basis on which she reached that conclusion. The estimate is a reasonable reflection of the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer that would be incurred by providing a service over the next decade for fewer than 15,000 people, almost 3,000 of whom did not pay for their card in the first place. Leaving aside the cost, the proposal would mean retaining the whole national identity register for another decade, which would involve holding the fingerprints of 15,000 innocent people.