Examination of Witnesses (Questions 503
- 519)
TUESDAY 27 APRIL 2004
20 APRIL 2004 MR
LEN COOK
AND MR
DENNIS ROBERTS
Q503 Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank
you for coming to this session. Just as a housekeeping matter,
it is possible we will have one or more divisions during the session
this afternoon, in which case I propose to adjourn for 12 minutes
to get through as much business as we can this afternoon. Mr Cook,
if you would like to introduce yourself and your colleague, please.
Mr Cook: Mr Chairman, I am Len
Cook. I am Registrar General for England and Wales and also the
National Statistician. Mr Dennis Roberts is one of the board members
of the Office for National Statistics and he is particularly responsible
for the Civil Registration Service and the management of the Citizen
Information Project.
Q504 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. Obviously one of the things that we are interested in
is the Citizen Information Project. The Government published a
draft Bill for identity cards yesterday which proposed establishing
a National Identity Register on which potentially every citizen
of the country might be in future. Through the ONS you are proposing
to set up a Citizen Information Project which is a national database
on which potentially every member of the public may be a member,
but they are different databases. Can you explain to the Committee
why we are having two national databases with individual information
on them and what the difference between them is?
Mr Cook: Mr Chairman, the identity
card project is about ensuring that the state knows that it is
dealing with the right person and so it is enabling the identity
of a citizen to be confirmed at the point of contact with a common
level of assurance about their identity. So the identity card
project is very much about knowing now, with exactly the same
level of quality, who we are dealing with. The Citizen Information
Project is about increasing the capacity of the public sector
to deal with citizens using all the information that comes from
the key interactions that citizens have with the public service
and it can draw on them by tying together the information that
we have about their address. Basically the Citizen Information
Project is about adding value to existing information and in building
up the quality of the existing registers whether they are in health,
tax, DVLA or other areas that contribute to the Citizen Information
Project and I think that is quite an important distinction. The
CIP in itself will not prevent fraud or detect illegal immigrants,
it is about the efficiency and responsiveness and the integrity
of the information managed by the state that it already has. The
first proposal that I am aware of in the British government for
a population register was actually by one of my predecessors in
1916, Sir Bernard Mallet, when he was Registrar General and at
intervals of around 30 years there have been additional proposals;
Lord Moser was working on a similar proposal in the 1960s. It
is very much about the efficiency of the information the state
already has and bringing it together in a trusted environment.
Q505 Chairman: So this is a project
that the Civil Service regularly dust off every few years until
they can find a Prime Minister who is willing to support it and
it has been so over several generations.
Mr Cook: I think it is quite natural
for the state to want to make the best use of the information
that it has got disparately organised.
Q506 Chairman: What is the difference?
As I understand it the Citizen Information Project is going to
have the name, address, date and place of birth, date of death,
sex and a unique reference number. The National Identity Register
is going to have the name, address, sex, a unique reference number
plus some biometric and immigration information and it will not
have the date and place of birth, but very largely you seem to
be recording the same information about the same people on two
separate databases. It is not obvious why Government, not having
had one of these since 1916, now needs to produce two of them
at the same time. Can you clarify for us exactly why we need two
databases recording very much the same information about the same
people?
Mr Cook: Firstly, the coverage
of the identity cards project is persons over 16 and at this stage
it is not clear whether it is voluntary or compulsory. The coverage
of the Citizen Information Project, the population register, is
essentially the total population of the United Kingdom and that
will be obtained by bringing together the populations of the different
registers that exist in health, tax, DVLA and education. By pooling
the dealings that the state has with its citizens it will approximate
the total population in its coverage. Firstly, the coverage is
quite different. Secondly, the ID card process is building up
a common level of assurance about the quality of the identity
and the certainty of the identity of an individual. The population
register contains information that reflects the quality of the
relationship between the state and the citizen on each of the
individual registers.
Q507 Chairman: So the Citizen Information
Project has less reliable information on more people?
Mr Cook: Yes, there will be information
on more people and the quantity of information on each person
will be less. The reliability, of course, will be reinforced by
the way in which the information is brought together from the
different sources and from which a single register is created.
Ideally, if we were in a perfect world where all our registers
were already of a very high quality, with no duplication or error
then the population register would be less obvious in its benefits
apart from the fact that it would provide a single unambiguous
list of the population. If each of these registers were of low
quality then we would probably spend so much time matching them
that we would actually choose to emphasise the improvements in
the quality of individual registers. So part of the whole evaluation
project is assessing where we are in between those two positions
in terms of the value of the project.
Q508 Chairman: When will it be complete?
Mr Cook: If this phase concludes
that there is a cost-benefit analysis that justifies the project—and
what is important to recognise is that wider whole of government
push for effective infrastructure that comes from, for example,
the Gershon review, which is recognising that there are benefits
in infrastructure regardless of whether it is a common address
register or a common business register and a common person register
across government—and if the issues in terms of the technical
and administrative and legal side of the project can proceed then
we estimate that two years after, were there the legal authority
to do so, we would actually have a population register that was
of sufficient quality to be providing benefits. Mr Roberts can
give you more detail as to the precise nature of that.
Q509 Chairman: So you could have
this population register in place in a few years time?
Mr Cook: Yes, because it is using
existing information and drawing on registers that already exist
and which themselves are independently being improved by initiatives
within those departments.
Q510 Chairman: This project has been
pushed for since 1919. What changes have you made to it in the
light of the more recent decision of the Government to go for
a National Identity Register?
Mr Cook: Between that decision
and the very clear imperatives from the Gershon review we see
the phase two report reporting not only on whether there should
be a population register or not but how we can achieve the goals
of the population register in part to varying degrees. For example,
one of the options might be that we have single comprehensive
legislation to oversee information matching which in itself was
conducted by individual agencies but which improves the quality
of individual registers without actually going to the next step
of creating a register. The step before that, of course, might
involve us simply having some common standards for register management
in the British government which allows us to match quite economically
when we want to do it. Fourthly, of course, we could do nothing
and recognise that doing nothing is not actually a status quo
because the existence of the ID card is going to improve the quality
of the identity of the people in each of the individual services
and, secondly, in many of these services, health in particular,
there is a huge amount of activity underway now to create a much
more improved register for operating the National Health Service.
So those are the four options that we would present and try and
identify the costs and benefits of.
Q511 Chairman: Can you give me as
a citizen one example of what the Citizen Information Project
will do for me that cannot be achieved through the National Identity
Register?
Mr Cook: A very simple one is
there will be one place where you could change your address with
effect across all the systems where address change could happen.
A second one could be the place where we draw the electoral register
from. An example used some 15 years ago by one of my predecessors[1]
was it could be used as a way of identifying contacts for cancer
screening, for example. In essence it is not only a way of identifying
the population but helping recognise those people that may be
the beneficiaries of services that with some stimulus they could
participate in.
Q512 Chairman: As I will have to
change my address on the National Identity Register, why cannot
the National Identity Register be used for the same purpose?
Mr Cook: I think as we develop
the second phase of this project it will take account of the emerging
state of what the identity card project is doing and its form.
Some of these questions are really still being addressed in terms
of the development project at this stage.
Mr Roberts: I think there is still
a need for a procedure to pass on that information. If you change
your address and provide another then the information has to flow
to each of those other registers and that is really what the CIP
will do. It may be in the future that one of the main channels
for passing that information would be through the identity card
register. If so, and subject to Parliament agreeing to that information
being shared with other registers, then a process would need to
be in place to pass that information to these other registers
to keep them all up-to-date and that is really the role of CIP.
Simply passing it to a National Identity Register does not mean
that the information flows through to the other registers. One
has to have a channel for passing that information on.
Q513 Chairman: Do you understand
my slight scepticism that the Government is building two parallel
registers and it now sounds to me as though I will have to report
a change of address to the National Identity Register and in order
to have my change of address usefully used anywhere else I will
have to report it to a different register that you are running?
Has anybody seriously looked hard at what you would appear to
have done in bringing these two processes together?
Mr Cook: It could well be a consequence
of phase two of this project that that seems a more sensible outcome
to plan for. What is important to recognise is the fact that the
population register could shortly cover completely the whole population
is quite an important aspect given the limitations of the identity
card coverage. Secondly, the value in terms of the capacity to
accumulate the lifetime experiences of citizens more than the
National Insurance contributions I think is something which we
see as an as yet unevaluated aspect of the Citizen Information
Project that we would see as part of phase two.
Q514 Chairman: Given what the civil
liberties groups have said to us about their concerns with an
ID card, it does rather sound as though your register is actually
going to do far more accumulation of masses amounts of data about
individuals and what they have done in their lives than has actually
been suggested in the National Identity Register.
Mr Cook: Firstly, there will be
no data about persons other than identifying material contained
in the population register.
Q515 Chairman: You have just said
that this is a way of accumulating information about a whole range
of things that have happened in people's lives, so the register
must either have or give people access to that.
Mr Cook: It could create the potential
for that if there were a legal wish to do so. What is important
is that the population register will create a legal context for
a huge variety of information matching, some of which is occurring
now on a bilateral basis to improve registers across the country.
Citizens will be much more effectively protected in terms of the
legal environment and the protections that would exist and the
limitations that will exist for the use of the information on
the population register.
Chairman: I wonder whether Liberty and
others have not been looking under the wrong stone.
Q516 Mr Taylor: We have been led
to understand that the National Identity Register will cover the
whole of the United Kingdom. You are the Registrar General for
England and Wales only. Would the CIP cover the whole of the UK
and, if so, who would be in charge of it or in charge of the rest
of it and will there be an independent statutory body to administer
it?
Mr Cook: There would most definitely
be an independent statutory body that would be involved in the
operation of it, it would have to have UK-wide authority. Ultimately
the implementation of the proposal of the Citizen Information
Project may well be such that it no longer would be part of the
responsibility of the Registrar General of England and Wales or
it could involve a different institutional arrangement. In terms
of the constituent data support that comes from the various registers,
a large number of those are UK-wide registers, there is already
a very high degree of engagement with the Registrars General of
Scotland and Northern Ireland and this project would continue
on that basis. There is a proposal to set up a project board which
involves those authorities.
Mr Roberts: We have already set
up a project board and we sent you details of that board in a
separate letter and you will see that that includes representatives
of the devolved administrations. So we are taking account of their
interests in working up this project.
Q517 Chairman: So we have a project
board for this project and there is a project board for the National
Identity Register. The National Identity Register will have a
statutory body of some sort overseeing it on which the government
is consulting and you will have a separate statutory body to have
oversight of the Citizen Information Project, is that right?
Mr Roberts: There are project
boards for the National Identity Register and for CIP and there
is Home Office representation on our project board, and I sit
on the National Identity Register project board in order to ensure
that the projects are developed in tandem.
Q518 Chairman: In a few years time
we will have two statutory boards.
Mr Roberts: The role of the project
definition phase that we have been asked to take forward by ministers
is to report back on the viability of the project, on the costs
and benefits of the project and on proposals for how it would
be taken forward and, therefore, no decisions have been taken
yet either on when the project should proceed or the form in which
it would be taken forward. Mr Cook was saying that it is not axiomatic
that it will be taken forward by the Registrar General for England
and Wales at this stage. We have simply been given the task of
carrying forward this stage of the project to check on its viability.
Q519 David Winnick: I am just curious.
Arising from all the answers that you gave to the Chairman, do
you keep a copy of 1984 in the office for inspiration?
Mr Cook: No, but I read it in
my youth, naturally!
1 `Population Registers: Some Administrative and
Statistical Pros and Cons' Philip Redfern, Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society, Series A Vol 152, No 1 (1989) Back
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