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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Member must remember that we refer to Members by their constituencies.
Mr. MacShane: In his diary entry of a Cabinet meeting in 1978, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn), whom some of us will be very sorry to see leave this place, recorded that, when it was first proposed that the European-style passport would replace the old, blue, stiff, leather board passport, my noble Friend Lord Shore said that it would be introduced over his dead body. I am glad to say that Lord Shore is alive and well and still fighting the great anti-European cause in another place.
I have one of those old stiff blue leather passports, for the simple reason that I once turned up in a Gulf state because my plane broke down coming back from Australia, and I found that, because my passport had the stamp of Israel in it, I was not allowed in. Everyone else was put up in a Hilton and given lots of nice food and drink for 48 hours; I was stuck in the airport. I was able to get a second British passport--I do not know whether that is still possible.
If one goes to funny countries, one can get a second passport. [Laughter.] That was true for South Africa. Hon. Members may laugh, but many exporters from this country faced that problem. It is a genuine problem, which does not deserve to be treated with flippancy by Opposition Members.
The Passport Agency managed to lose my passport and birth certificate five years ago, so I am not necessarily its biggest fan.
What are the causes of the present problem? Hon. Members enjoyed themselves when I gently suggested that an extra 200,000 people applying this year was a tribute to the fact that British citizens enjoy their holidays abroad. They have a stronger pound, and more of them are in work. I do not know whether that can be factored into the way in which the Passport Agency plans its activities, but it certainly was not.
The British visitors passport was withdrawn by the previous Government. That was the automatic passport for many of my constituents. They went to the post office, showed their birth certificate, got their pink passport and off they went on their holidays. My purpose is not to lay blame, but the withdrawal of a popular and much-used travel document without the introduction of adequate replacement mechanisms cannot be attributed to the present Government.
There is the further problem of children requiring a separate passport. I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald is not in her place. I thought that she was flippantly irresponsible in her handling of the subject. Each year, 120 children are abducted. To say that a baby's picture on the passport is no hindrance to anyone planning an abduction is nonsense. The children cannot simply be put on the parent's passport. A husband or wife who wants to take the children out of the country must go through the procedure of getting a separate passport for each child. That must help to slow down an extremely serious problem. The right hon. Lady dealt with it with disgraceful flippancy.
The computer contract was drawn up under the previous Administration. Perhaps my right hon. Friend should not have signed it, but I pay tribute to him for being honest and communicating with hon. Members. He has done his best. I have had problems in my constituency--
Mr. Maclean:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. How honest was it to distribute a photograph and say that there was good news--there were no queues round the passport offices last Friday?
Mr. MacShane:
I am not responsible for what the Liverpool Daily Post publishes. I recall queueing up at Petty France in the 1970s and 1980s to get a passport.
The problem is that some exceptional cases have arisen. It is also linked to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate problem, and reflects the extent to which London has become a great global city in recent years. There are 100,000 French people working in the UK. We open our arms to them. People from abroad work in our country on a scale that was not envisaged five or 10 years ago. That explains the number of people applying for passports or applying to have their passports renewed. Unlike the isolationist, anti-European, xenophobic Conservative party, I welcome the fact that we have many foreigners working in Britain and that many of our citizens want to travel to Europe and elsewhere.
Mr. Allan:
The hon. Gentleman seems to be suggesting that the problem may grow, rather than reduce, with increasing globalisation. Can we ever reach a point at which there will be no queues, we have a genuinely efficient system and we stop blaming one Government or another? What are his ideas for achieving that?
Mr. MacShane:
As they say in "Under Milk Wood", I am coming to that.
I have here my mobile phone--switched off, Mr. Deputy Speaker--which is on the One2One network; hon. Members should try getting through on it at any time of the day or night. We can have all the call centres in the world, but there will still be huge queues.
The real problem is that the Conservative party has enjoyed the problems created by what is undoubtedly a worrying situation. I ask all hon. Members to put their hands on their hearts. I wanted to intervene on the hon. Member for Hertsmere to ask how many individual cases have been referred to him. I have had cases referred to me, and I have tried to sort them out. I had such cases last year and the year before, and I had them when he was a Minister. I expect that I shall have them for years to come.
The almost total absence of Conservative Members from the debate shows that the problems have not been quite as they have recounted, but we should move to discussing real solutions that might work. I return to an exchange that I had with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary at the previous Home Office questions. We should consider whether the time has come for Britain to issue voluntary national identity cards. That relates to what the hon. Member for Hallam said about a travel document.
Mr. Allan:
I should make it clear to the hon. Gentleman that I am not in favour of identity cards. I was referring to the Passport Agency's own document, which says that
Mr. MacShane:
The hon. Gentleman is making a meal of that. Whatever we call it, the purpose of such a card
Nearly every citizen in Europe can travel on an ID card. I have two here--I hasten to add that they do not belong to me. The French national identity card is voluntary and issued locally. The German identity card is compulsory, but it records little information. When it is renewed every 10th year, a completely new number is issued. As hon. Members can imagine, the Germans are extremely sensitive about compulsory ID cards. The countries that have voluntary ID cards are France, Austria, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. Cards are compulsory in other European Union member states. Gibraltar issues an ID card and people can travel on it. It is slightly odd that Britain is so far behind its own colony in issuing ID cards.
This matter was discussed under the previous Government. I refer to the Home Affairs Committee fourth report of 1996, which, in paragraph 31, concluded:
There are discussions in Whitehall about a new driver's licence and--although wishes may be ahead of reality and there may not be such a card for some time--slightly more futuristic discussions about a card for social security and perhaps even tax arrangements are taking place. We may have to wait some time, but the driver's licence, if member states would accept it as an ID card, would more than fulfil my requirements.
Last year, I went with my wife to Spain for a wedding anniversary party. I arrived at Heathrow and found that I had forgotten my passport, which was the end of what was meant to be a lovely weekend. Had this country--like Gibraltar, other European countries and the United States--issued a wallet-sized ID card to its inhabitants, I would have been able to fulfil all her dreams and take her away for that happy weekend in Spain, but it could not start for another 24 hours.
A wallet-sized ID card is one solution. Conservative Members have been wallowing in the problem, but the hon. Member for Hallam has proposed another, concrete, solution, as I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire (Mr. Barnes) and other hon. Members will do. We know that Conservative Members are not keen on British citizens going to Europe because they might learn something. They are locked into isolationism, which is the shame of modern Toryism. The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald was so keen to encourage travel that she used to shackle pregnant women to their prison beds. She never once came to the House to say sorry for that.
"Ministers indicated their wish to pursue the introduction of a photocard passport"
on the back of the driving licence, which is a photocard. I was not referring to a separate ID card.
"there is a definite benefit to be obtained from use of an ID card as a valid travel card within Europe."
The response of the Government of the day was to accept that recommendation, but nothing was carried forward in their dying days.
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