Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240 - 259)

TUESDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2004

MR MARTIN HALL, COUNCILLOR GERALD VERNON-JACKSON AND MRS JAN BERRY

  Q240  Chairman: So your view on this is coloured very much by the aspiration which you have, which we will come back to later: that you would have direct access to the database?

  Mr Hall: Not direct access but indirect access, through credit reference agencies, yes.

  Mrs Berry: Our view is that we need to check people's identity with the technology that is available at the time. We know there are counterfeit passports; we know there are counterfeit driving licences. The information we have is that technology is now available through biometrics would provide a far more credible and reliable database. We are actually checking people who will be in front of us, as opposed to the situation where it might be down a telephone line, where credit reference and identity need to be confirmed. For us, we have actually got the individual there.

  Q241  Chairman: Mr Vernon-Jackson, what is the local government view?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: On the issue of the database our view was that having a single identifier number was extremely useful, to link together different databases within government. The hearings we heard gave the impression that the idea of Big Brother—of different government departments talking to each other—was not a reality. Everybody operated their entirely separate systems and so actually having something that brought together the DWP, National Insurance, the Department of Health—all those systems and the different ways information is stored on us—would actually be useful. So we were very keen on that. We were much less certain about the card. Without biometrics, we have considerable worries that the card does not have huge amounts of use—just because of the issue of forgery or if it can be forged. If we are giving people the impression that this identity card is a gateway through to everything, then people have to have trust that it is not forgeable. Without biometrics, therefore, we would be worried about it. We have worries about the whole issue of people having to have a card anyway. We are much less certain about whether the card issue is right, but we are very keen on the individual identifier number, to be able to pull together different bits of information about us.

  Q242  Chairman: If somebody does not have a card but they have a number, how do you envisage that being used in the local government context?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: In terms of local government we are not sure that there will be a huge amount of uses, because we do not spend a lot of time checking people's identity. The real areas for us are about housing benefit and council tax benefit. There are differences of view about how much a card would be useful without biometrics. At the moment, people have to produce a passport or they have to produce driving licences or else, if they do not have those, a whole range of other documentation. In terms of benefit fraud, the advice I have from my officers is that it is unlikely to make a huge amount of difference. So the card seems much less important to us than the number that joins together different bits of information that are already collected about us.

  Q243  Chairman: So you are not so much advocating an identity card as having better handling of government data and a reference point that links up the information about different individuals?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: Yes.

  Q244  Chairman: Perhaps I can ask the Police Federation this. You say in your evidence that there are lessons to be learned from systems abroad. Can you tell us a bit more about what you have in mind? What lessons have you drawn from international experience?

  Mrs Berry: We have spoken to colleagues throughout Europe, some of the countries have identity cards but maybe not with biometrics, although I believe that Belgium and one other country are looking towards digitising some biometrics at the moment. There are a lot of countries who have identity cards, who are quite surprised that we even asked the question, and do not see any difficulties with it. In America and in Australia we looked at some experience they have had over a period of time and I believe views have changed, in some respects depending on the political situation. Certainly in Australia you go back nine years, when they had a huge debate about the feasibility of identity cards. It started off being fairly well supported, but then it got lost in some of the detail, there was a tremendous anti campaign, and it was lost. In America, probably since 9/11, the views on identity cards have changed. Certainly, on a European basis, a lot of our colleagues are questioning why we are even asking the question. They cannot think of how their job could be done without having direct access to the identity of the person they are speaking to.

  Q245  Chairman: A final open question to each of you, so that I am clear. If somebody has a card which, for the sake of argument, has biometric data on it, how often do each of you envisage that biometric data being verified—presuming there is a local reader of some sort, as opposed to somebody simply offering the card, which may have the information encoded but which is not readable by an individual person? Mr Hall, you were talking about people on the telephone who, by definition, cannot have anybody reading their card. How does any of the data in the card help identify the person on the telephone with the person to whom you may be giving a loan?

  Mr Hall: Essentially, you would ask the person what their number was, ask them some details about themselves, and verify that data against the central record via a credit reference agency, if that was available. In the case of face-to-face transactions, of which I do not know the proportion—I could find out, roughly—if the cost of biometric verification was cheap enough, then the whole thing would be much more attractive. I was not saying that we were against it; simply that it was not essential, given what looks like the cost of checking at the moment. All in all—and these are very by-and-large numbers—we think something like 100-150 million identity checks a year are done through credit reference agencies, of which quite a high proportion would be without the person being present. But "a lot" would be the answer, and probably more if a more reliable system were available.

  Mrs Berry: We have hundreds of thousands of contacts with suspects, victims, offenders, throughout a year. We would therefore expect there to be some mobile technology for officers to use on the streets, to prevent having to take people into police stations for verification of details. Street bail is now to be available, and so you would need some verification of people's identity on the street.

  Q246  Chairman: Those uses are therefore highly dependent, are they, on there being this mobile technology? The simple proffering of a card with a photo on it would not really deliver what you need.

  Mrs Berry: No, a photograph on its own would be insufficient to verify to the standard we need to verify. You would need to have biometrics. I would argue that if you want to have the widest possible use of the card, then it would need to be more than one biometric on the card.

  Q247  Chairman: At the moment, the Government's plans—I think that your evidence says this, Mr Vernon-Jackson—do not include the cost of providing local reader systems, either mobile or fixed. To the extent that you can envisage using a card, would you see it as needing a lot of local readers in housing benefit offices, or wherever else?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: It depends to what use you are going to put the card. I think that the biometrics make it much more interesting. There are four things that come to my mind where it could be particularly useful. I think that it would be crucial in terms of doing housing benefit and council tax benefit. That means, with local authorities having one-stop shops spread around their local authority areas, a large number. There are two other things, however. It depends on what databases it is linked to. One of the things we could be doing is having people voting with these, and people able not just to vote in their polling station but effectively to vote anywhere—because it is all connected through a central computer. Also, if the Department of Health are talking about having centralised medical records, then it would be very useful for social services to be able, when doing an assessment of somebody and carrying out a home visit, to access people's medical records. It could mean that the social services' assessment of what people's needs are would be much more accurate and also tie in with what the doctors are prescribing for those people. Again, as with the police, that means large numbers of handheld, portable readers which are able to connect into a central system, and where we are able to read what is held on a whole range of different databases.

  Q248  Chairman: Can we move on to the creation of the central database? By the way, if any of you feel that some of these questions are beyond your own organisation's technical expertise, that is fine, because we will be having a range of witnesses. I just wonder whether any of you have any particular views on the key things that should be taken into account in trying to create a reliable central database.

  Mr Hall: We felt that none of the available ones was, of itself, sufficient to be able to do that. That is by definition. Otherwise we would not be looking at the problem. The DVLA has a reasonably reliable database, but not reliable enough. There are clearly far more National Insurance numbers in issue than there are people who are eligible to have them. There is something that has gone wrong there. We felt—but probably with a lot of reservations, because it is far from complete—that the electoral roll was probably the place to start. Building on whatever there was, however, including credit reference agency data—which is often more up to date than official records, but also DVLA, passports, and whatever other databases presented themselves. It would be a painstaking task at the beginning, however, to get the degree of accuracy that you would want in order to feel confident.

  Q249  Chairman: You have made the point, which I think the Government accept, that the existing records of the DVLA and the Passport Agency are not sufficiently good to rely purely on those as the raw material for the new database. Do you have any worries about those two agencies being the main issuing bodies of the new identity cards in the future, assuming that they are relying on a different database?

  Mr Hall: I do not think that we do, no. I am assuming that there is access to the necessary technology, and we would be perfectly able to cope with it. I do not see how you would do it otherwise than by this sort of gradualist approach of those two routes, perhaps plus a new route of people who simply apply for a card. I think that you need to use all channels to assemble the database in the very first place.

  Q250  Chairman: Do any of the three of you have particular views about how the process of registering an individual on the database should be handled? Obviously you have to match a particular person and their biometrics with the central database and this other information. Do you have any particular thoughts about how that should be handled? The LGA have suggested that might be handled more at local level than on a central database.

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: And I think that we would be happy to offer our services in terms of collecting that data, because people will have to come in, to be seen, so that the biometrics can be sampled, or whatever. If we are being honest, if this debate is being driven by issues of national security and issues around people being in the UK who should not be in the UK, we are actually talking about trying to target people at the very margins of society. None of the databases that we have really address that issue. The electoral register may be 85 to 90% accurate but, if the push is coming in terms of trying to identify those 10%, then almost none of our databases work. We would be happy for the electoral register to be used as a basis, but it is how you find those 10% and then track those 10% of people, who are the people who will often move very frequently, who will not have records, and all of those problems. I am sure that we would be happy to volunteer our services, therefore. We have offices everywhere, but it is a real issue in terms of the number of cards that will have to be issued each year on the electoral register—even excluding those 10% of people. In London, 40% change address every year. In Southampton, 25% change every year. That is a huge number of cards that would have to be reissued—and that is only having to register once a year. With people who are serially moving, it will be an extremely difficult process to make sure that things are accurate.

  Q251  Mrs Dean: Can I turn to you first, Mr Vernon-Jackson? Could you say a little more about when local authorities currently check identity? You have mentioned housing benefit. Do local authorities currently ask for proof of identification when, say, children are registered at school?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: We do a range of different things. Identity is checked in different ways, according to different things. When somebody registers to be a member of the library, we will ask for an identification, and whatever. But, if we are honest, we are not going to spend huge amounts of time doing it. If somebody runs off with some library books, it is unfortunate, but people do not often do it and, anyway, it does not cost huge amounts of money. So you go through a range of different things. The issue that we have all felt is the most difficult is where there are large amounts of public money involved. That is where the housing benefit aspect comes in. That is where I think our main interest in this would be. We do £40-£50 million worth of housing benefit in Portsmouth every year, and that is a huge amount of public money. There is a range of things, therefore: libraries at one end; housing benefit at the other, where we will spend much more time with the DWP verification framework, trying to make sure that everybody is right. If the truth be known—I do not have kids and I have never done education—I do not know whether we ask people for identification when kids register for school. I know that the Department of Education are looking for each child to have a pupil number, to track them through life. I do not know much more detail than that. I am sorry; I am no expert on it.

  Q252  Mrs Dean: Do you agree with the Information Commissioner that there are some services for which ID cards should not be used if they were introduced? Would libraries be a good example?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: We have developed our own series of smart cards for people in local authority areas, where people effectively have local authority identity cards. It looks as if our cards have some services that will not be available on the national cards. For instance, we have the ability to have an e-purse on it, so that people can charge up their card with money and, if you get on a bus, it will buy your bus ticket; it will pay your library fines for you; it will pay for you to go to the swimming pool; it will pay for you to park your car. That level of smart card technology, as I understand it, is not what the Government are looking at. It looks as if we will run our own parallel system, therefore, even when this comes out. They may be of some use. Because the options on it do not give us the chance of being able to carry on some of those things, it will not be a huge amount of use for us in identifying people for things like library cards.

  Q253  Mrs Dean: So you still see the existing local smart cards continuing?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: I think that we would not be averse to having the two merged but, having spent the time and effort to create things where we are trying to move, for a lot of services, away from a cash economy into a smart card economy, I think that we would be very loath to lose that—just because it is so convenient for lots of services and lots of people.

  Q254  Mrs Dean: You have told us that you have not been involved in any discussions about the services councils provide. What consultation would you like to see?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: When we had our hearings, different groups of people came to talk to us about the issues around civil liberties, housing benefits, the technology that we currently operate as local councils. That was useful. The issue we would like explored more is how it will affect the people who may be perceived as being at the margins of society. We drew two people. If I were a middle-aged, white lady living on the Isle of Wight, then I would not actually be asked for my card very often. If I am young, male, black, and living in Brixton, then the perception is that I would be asked to prove identity much more frequently. I think that we have real worries about what that does for community cohesion, especially as this has been brought up with the idea that we are looking at national security and people who are illegal immigrants. I think that we would want much more consultation—and I am sure you are doing it—with members of those groups of society who are perceived as being on the edge of society, about what effect this card is likely to have and if, in effect, it becomes compulsory for people to carry it. If you are young, male, black, and live in Brixton, and you are stopped, asked for it, and do not have it, if this is about national security and people being illegal immigrants, the police are not going to say, "Can you go and collect it, and bring it to the police station within seven days and show it to us?". They are going to say, "You have to produce it now". Otherwise, the whole point of it from the national security point of view is useless. I think that is where our concern mainly rests—in the community cohesion issue.

  Q255  Janet Anderson: Mr Vernon-Jackson, perhaps I could ask you a brief supplementary. You particularly referred to the amount of public money that is spent on housing benefit in your area alone. Do you think that the introduction of identity cards would help local authorities to reduce the incidence of housing benefit fraud?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: The advice I have from my housing benefit people in Portsmouth is that they do not see that, without biometrics, it will be of much additional use, because of the ability to create forgeries. With biometrics, there may be some use. The advice from my colleagues in Smith Square is different. They think that it would help to reduce it; but I prefer to trust the people on the front line in Portsmouth who are actually handing the money out. There is more of an issue about organised fraud, large-scale fraud, through landlords, where identity is actually not the issue. It may have an effect on housing benefit fraud, but I do not think that it will solve the problem.

  Q256  Mrs Dean: What lessons do you think there are for central government, from your experience of service provision by local government?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: I think that having smart card technology is very useful. If we are going to go down this route, I think that we are disappointed that it looks as if it is such a low-technology card and will not enable local providers to be able to access databases, to save some of the hassle that people have continuously to go through, filling in forms and having to re-reveal information. The social services-health interface seems to us a particularly important issue.

  Q257  Mrs Dean: So you would like a high-tech card?

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: Yes.

  Q258  Mrs Dean: Then you could get rid of your local ones.

  Councillor Vernon-Jackson: I think that some people would love to keep their own cards. Bracknell are very proud of their cards. But I think there is benefit in saying that people should have to carry as few bits of plastic as possible. With having to have a different driving licence card to a passport card because of the problem of the placement of photos—people look as if they will have to carry several of these. So why make life more complicated for people?

  Q259  David Winnick: Are you dissatisfied, Mr Hall, with the present arrangements as far as security is concerned about lending money and other financial arrangements made by the various companies which make up your organisation?

  Mr Hall: How do you mean? Are we concerned about fraud?


 
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