|
Mr. Browne: The hon. Gentleman has just summarised—with respect, very unhelpfully, because inaccurately—the relationship between this Bill and police powers. I do not know where he got his summary from but I suspect that it was from a briefing note provided to him by some external interested party. Perhaps he could point out to the Committee where in the Bill there are provisions that could properly be summarised in the way that he has just done. I do not recognise them. I ask the hon. Gentleman to point out where in the Bill such powers exists, because they are not in any Bill that I have read or presented.
Mr. Malins: The police have certain powers over the Minister and me if we are walking along the street. They are very limited powers, and we guard our safety and independence in that respect very carefully. Under the Bill, if a police officer deems it to be for the prevention or detection of any crime, he can go to the central register to identify me. He will have access to 51 registrable facts to which he has not had access hitherto. All he has to say is that it is for the purposes
Column Number: 29
of the prevention or detection of crime. It is as vague as that. There is no test of reasonableness, and that widens the provision immensely.
Mr. Browne: I shall not debate the issue with the hon. Gentleman at this stage, because we will come to the issue later, but I suggest that what he says is a gross misunderstanding of the Bill and the powers that the police will be given. The hon. Gentleman may think it appropriate to attach his interpretation to the clause, but I suggest that it is the wrong interpretation. However, we will deal with the issue in due course.
Mr. Malins: The Minister conveniently says that we will deal with the subject in due course, but let us grab the bull by the horns now. The provision relates to a secure method for registrable facts about me to be ascertained or verified when it is necessary in the public interest. It is a matter of public interest if a policeman decides, without challenge or without any reasonable tests, as far as I can see, that he wants to have access to all 51 of my registrable facts for the so-called purpose of preventing or detecting a crime.
Mr. Allan: The technical interaction is between the clause, clause 18, which defines the powers to access it, and, importantly, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the new serious and organised crime provisions, which redefine what is an arrestable offence. When all those measures are put together, one gets an idea of when the police can and cannot demand the information that is held in the register.
Mr. Malins: The hon. Gentleman, with whom I have served many times on Committees considering criminal justice Bills, makes a good point. However, we want to know what the police's powers are.
I will summarise extremely briefly. The central part of this Bill is to establish a national identity register. Individuals will have to provide up to 51 personal facts about themselves to go on the register. We need to know whether the register will be of real help in curing the mischiefs to which the Government refer in clause 1(4). The mischiefs relate to national security, detection of crime, immigration controls, illegal working, and the efficient provision of public services. My amendment seeks to put the mischief of terrorism, which began all this, at the top of that agenda. It is important that clarity of purpose is established in the Bill and I have tabled the amendment to enable a wide-ranging debate to take place.
Mr. Allan: I am grateful to the hon. Member for Woking for tabling the amendment. The group of amendments goes to the heart of the most important provision in the Bill, which is the national identity register. ID cards are as nothing compared with the importance of that. In a sense, they are a side issue—an optional extra—and if the Bill were to give due prominence to the real significance of the changes that are to be put in place, it would be called the national identity register Bill.
I will briefly touch on the issue of illegal working, although this will not be the main substance of my comments. It is one of the most dishonest selling points
Column Number: 30
for the legislation. If there is a fault in the enforcement provisions against illegal working, it is in a lack of will rather than a lack of means to enforce. The lack of will relates to a much wider debate. It is because of economic factors; there is a gamut of reasons why there is a lack of will to enforce provisions against illegal working, with which all European countries are dealing. Indeed, a large number of European countries are contemplating amnesties and other things in order to regularise workers. They are not enforcing because they recognise that they have economic incentives not to enforce provisions against illegal working.
We should be honest about that situation, rather than saying that it is because we have not got ID cards. They will not make any significant difference to whether or not we tackle illegal working. That is a function of whether we are prepared to enforce the provisions that already exist. They were brought into force by this Government and therefore, presumably, they are perfect in terms of their legal ability to be enforced. I have sat through discussion of the immigration Bills that introduced them. As I said, we should be honest with the public.
We will probably end up with three categories of workers after the introduction of ID cards. The first will be those who are legal and have an ID card that says so. The second will be people who are definitely illegal, because they will not have been entitled to register for an ID card under clause 2. They will be aliens who have no right to be here, but, as the Minister said, the Secretary of State might have required them to be registered. The third will be, so to speak, status unknowns.
We will develop a market in which those who have not got ID cards or who are definitely illegal will be put on to illegal workers pay rates, as they are now. I do not think that anything will functionally change. We shall only make more concrete the distinction between the pay rate paid to a legal worker and that paid to an illegal worker. That is a dishonest selling point for the Bill.
The substance of the clause is important. The words that I have introduced are ''necessity'' and ''proportionality'', which are important tests that have to be applied. The purposes of the register are critical to whether the Government can establish that it passes the test of necessity and proportionality in the context of article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which relates to the right to privacy. It is important that the proposal continues the tradition under UK law of having databases. The status quo is that the Government have access to a huge variety of databases, ranging from the criminal records database, which is specifically for law enforcement purposes, through the driving licence database, which ensures that we have good order on the roads and that parking tickets get to the right person, and NHS databases, to the database that is perhaps the closest one we have to a full adult national database—the electoral register. That is enforced by law; there are penalties if one does not register for the electoral register.
Column Number: 31
The defining characteristic of all those databases is that they are for specific purposes. This is where we see a fundamental change in the relationship between state and citizen, to which the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon referred in his opening comments. Every register that exists has a specific defined set of purposes, which, to borrow the Government's language, are all about rights and responsibilities. The Government have a right to demand certain data from a citizen, because they have a responsibility to deliver a specific service. That is how databases have evolved. We are now potentially making a step change by moving towards this generic database and saying that the Government have a right to demand data for a range of generic purposes. The purposes are no longer specifically defined. That means that the power relationship changes.
Currently, the Government have a right to demand data only as long as they deliver the service to the citizen. In other words, the Government are the citizen's servant. Our fear is that the new database reverses that and that the citizen is the servant of the state and has a duty to hand data over whether or not the state needs that data. In talking about the purposes and defining them accurately, we are trying to ensure that they genuinely warrant the state taking extra powers to itself. We have some sympathy with some of the purposes. I can understand that biometric data are particularly convenient for the purposes of border control, for example, because there is no other contextual information at border control. People have to decide whether to let an individual in. They can take their physical characteristics, but they have no other contextual data.
Mr. Jon Owen Jones (Cardiff, Central) (Lab/Co-op): I am listening to the arguments about where rights and responsibilities lie. Could not it equally be argued that the situation is the mirror image of what has been described? The citizen has rights to services and the state has a responsibility to provide the services. The citizen expects the state to deliver those services efficiently and properly and to use money well, in which case it is the state's responsibility to the citizen to ensure that it spends its money properly and gives services to those who are entitled to them and not to those who are not so entitled.
Mr. Allan: The hon. Gentleman is correct, and in a sense I would follow his logic. At the heart of my argument are concerns to do with the principle of the state having data in a broader sense than it specifically needs to deliver services, but I can also follow up the hon. Gentleman's point about value for money. For the state to do what I see happening here, which is to take a form of register that is appropriate for one specific purpose—we started off with biometric passports and then rolled it on to all these other functions—and to use an overkill solution, an overengineered solution, for something for which it is not necessary, is a gross waste of money. We could, for example, come up with 100 solutions for accessing
Column Number: 32
NHS services that are different from the current system, under which people turn up and staff assume that they are who they say they are. I am thinking of systems ranging from chip and PIN to many cheaper ones. Or we can apply the massive overkill solution that we are discussing here, but which is grossly disproportionate to the perceived benefits that will come from it. Across the range of purposes set out, that solution will not be the most appropriate one, so we have an objection in principle and in relation to value for money.
11.15 am
|
