Examination of Witnesses (Questions 237
- 239)
TUESDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2004
MR MARTIN
HALL, COUNCILLOR
GERALD VERNON-JACKSON
AND MRS
JAN BERRY
Q237 Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank
you very much for coming. Before we start the question session,
it may be helpful for the press and the public to know that the
Committee has decided to hold a special hearing on 24 February
on the migration aspects of EU enlargement. We will be sending
out the usual formal press notice about that. We welcome the witnesses
for this session on ID cards. Because there is likely to be a
vote at four and we would normally go until about quarter past
four, we will aim, if we can, to finish the session at four, to
avoid having a long adjournment and just a few minutes after that.
We will see how that goes, however. Can I ask each of you to introduce
yourselves briefly for the Committee, and then we will get underway?
Mrs Berry: My name is Jan Berry
and I am the Chairman of the Police Federation.
Mr Hall: Martin Hall. I am the
Director-General of the Finance & Leasing Association, which
is a trade association representing asset finance, consumer finance
and motor finance—about £64.7 billion a year of new
finance for consumers.
Councillor Vernon-Jackson: I am
Gerald Vernon-Jackson. I am Deputy Leader of Portsmouth City Council,
and I am a member of the LGA executive.
Q238 Chairman: Can I start with some
general questions about the scope of the proposed central database
under the Government's proposals? The Home Office has made it
clear that the only information which would be held on a central
database or on a card is what is necessary to verify identity,
such as name, address, date of birth, gender, immigration status,
plus the biometric identifiers. Some of you, at least in your
evidence, obviously aspire to have more information than that
held, either on the central database or on the card—or that
is how I understand it. Do you think that what the Government
are proposing is a sufficient level of information to be held
on a card? Mr Hall, I do not know if you have a view on that?
Mr Hall: From our point of view,
which is primarily to identify people and then link, through identification
through a credit reference agency, it is more or less right. I
think that we would like to see information from the birth and
death register in the database, although not on the card, simply
because impersonation of dead people is quite common. So it would
be good to have entries which have a death record, which are then
retained—and the ID number of course. Otherwise, we would
be happy. The biometric, I think, would not be necessary for our
particular purposes.
Mrs Berry: We are relatively happy
with the information. The more information you have, the wider
the benefits can be. We also accept that the more information
that is there, the more concern for people there will be that
the information might not be used for the reasons it is being
kept. We are very keen to see the inclusion of biometrics. We
see that provides the reliability and robustness that maybe were
absent from previous proposals. We would want to see more than
one biometric, rather than reliance on one.
Q239 Chairman: I will come to you,
Mr Vernon-Jackson, but can we just explore between you why, in
your case Mr Hall, you do not regard the biometrics as essential
and why, in the police case, you do?
Mr Hall: In many cases people
are seeking credit where they are not physically present. In that
case, you would ask the number; you would ask them a few questions
about themselves; then you would check the information they had
given you against the central database. What we would suggest,
where people are physically present, is some sort of electronic
check. I have brought, and I will leave it behind for the clerk,
an ultraviolet light. We have sent to every single motor dealership
an ultraviolet light which reveals particular features in the
present driving licence, and this is proving very useful. So I
think that would be quite a helpful thing, irrespective of whether
you had biometrics or not.
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