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Mr. Browne: I opened up this debate and perhaps I should have come better prepared. I am interested in the hon. Gentleman's response, because I suspect that he took a shot in the dark when he said that the register of births was for specific purposes. Clearly, the first purpose was to register births, but, in fact, extracts of that register are used for a myriad of things. I am sure that he knows that for in excess of 150 years the legislative framework for the register has been such that I could get an extract of the registration of the birth of every individual in this Room simply by paying the fee to the registrar—if I knew where the registration had been made. Without knowing that, I suspect that I could search on the net for where someone was born and approximate where the registration was made. More than likely I could then get an extract of the registration of birth for the payment of a fee.
There is no restriction on the use to which the register of births is put. It is a comprehensive database backed by compulsion and there are penalties for
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failure to register; parents are compelled to register the birth of their children within a period of time. It is an open register.
Mr. Allan: It holds a single fact.
Mr. Browne: The hon. Gentleman says that it holds a single fact; it holds a substantial amount of information about people and not just a single fact. It holds details of who the parents were, where the individual was born, their date of birth, and their gender. Indeed, for a period of time it held the parents' occupations. I have not asked for such an extract for anybody for a long time, because I have not practised as a solicitor for some time, so I am not sure, but I think that it includes the parents' occupations.
The point is that if the lobby that is against ID cards—it would not be fair to say the civil liberties lobby, because it is not everybody—is to construct a massive attack on the basis that the proposals shift fundamentally the relationship between the individual and the state, it is up to that lobby to make that argument. I include the hon. Gentleman in that. The argument must be made in a coherent and intellectually honest fashion. It is not open to that lobby to ignore the registers and databases that exist and what they are used for, and to argue that we must all accept that they are for limited purposes but that this measure is substantially different. It is not. I do not get any sense that people are persuaded that there will be a massive change.
The hon. Gentleman may say that the difference is that the databases that he referred to are for limited purposes, but that the proposed register is for everything. No doubt the argument will change from specific purposes to limited purposes; I shall make the argument for him before he intervenes. The register is for the purposes that are laid out in the Bill. I grant that those purposes are more extensive than some of the purposes for which other databases are held, and I grant also that the specific purposes that are set out subsume some of the purposes for which other databases are held by the Government. However, they do not add significantly to the powers that public authorities already enjoy.
The purposes offer authorities, the police in particular and those who provide public services the opportunity for the first time to use a guaranteed, accurate database. Until now, it has been hit and miss and up to the value of the documentation or the information that the individual or somebody else could produce. If the system works, provides the level of certainty that it should and is tied to biometric information, an individual can be certain for the first time that people are provided with accurate information about their identity and, more importantly, that no one is stealing it.
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Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon) (Con): I suspect that the introduction of registers of birth was an attempt to update to the industrial world the
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records that had already been kept at a parish level in England. However, does the Minister accept the argument about the incrementalism of the data being collected? It is easy enough to say, ''Well, this is simply an extension of what has been done and it goes back 100 or 200 years'', but surely it is legitimate to argue that there is a tipping point because of the sheer accumulation of the information.
The Minister said that the provision was extensive, but it is significantly hypothetical because the purposes are hypothetical and very much subjective in the sense that we can ask who reaches the conclusion that it is necessary to stop crime Who makes the decisions about the efficient and effective provision of public services? When I consider the list, it is difficult to conceive of any activity in which I might engage in my everyday life that would not justify someone making such demands of me.
Mr. Browne: It does not matter what the genealogy of the legislation in the mid-19th century was or what led Parliament to decide that national registers were appropriate throughout the United Kingdom. The existence of the register since then cuts the feet entirely from the argument that, by the collection of registrable facts, we are fundamentally changing the relationship between the state and the individual. The right hon. Gentleman did not deploy that argument, but those who do should not be entitled any longer to make such assertions and walk away from them. The whole debate has been plagued by people making grand assertions about liberty, but then walking away from them and not staying around to justify and explain what they meant.
In the second part of his argument, the right hon. Gentleman said that there was a tipping point at which the collection of information moves from what is— to adopt the argument of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam—proportionate to what becomes disproportionate. I intend to deal with the matter and if the right hon. Gentleman will bear with me, he will understand that I accept the challenge of spelling out why making such a change now, apart from the arguments that were rehearsed by his hon. Friends from the Front Bench about terrorism, is proportionate and reasonable.
The right hon. Gentleman was not in Committee for the beginning of my contribution to the debate this afternoon—he almost certainly had other important things to do and I am not criticising him—but I made it clear that I thought that the debate would not be served by doing what he did. He confused purposes with powers. To understand the Bill, we must understand the purposes of the register as set out under clause 1. The powers that people will have to access the information will be much restricted and are set out later in the Bill. I explained that at some length to the Committee and I do not intend to repeat myself. However, if the right hon. Gentleman has an opportunity to read the report of that part of the debate he should do so, because I spelt out the difference.
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It is an important difference, and if it is not kept, it will be possible to come to the conclusion that hon. Members have reached so far in this debate, which is that the very fact that the purposes are set out means that everybody will be able to access this information if they can justify that. They will not; the powers of access are set out and significantly constrained in later parts of the legislation, and I will have to justify all of them when we debate them. I will be prepared to do so.
For example, there is no power in the Bill to require production of an identity card to the police. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam will say that that is unnecessary because people will have their biometrics on them in any event, and he is right. However, this is yet another area where misinformation is introduced into the debate to support an unsustainable argument against identity cards. I read that a member of the official Opposition rather grandly said that the first time a police officer asks him to produce his identity card, he will eat it. Under this Bill, he will never be asked to produce his identity card, because the Bill is not about giving the police additional powers. There are very good reasons for that; we do not want to live in a society in which the police can stop people and require them to produce an identity card just because they know that they are required to have a card. However, we want to give the police the power to ascertain the identity of a person with certainty where they already have the power to do that in the current legislative structure that they operate within—such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, in England and Wales, associated with the Serious Organised Crime Agency and other organisations. The debates on this issue must be had in the context of discussions on policing, rather than in this context. This legislation is not about giving creeping increased powers to the police in their relationships with individuals.
I suspect that the final point that could be made on this matter is that once we get beyond that sticking point, there is a danger of there being some sort of creep that moves us into a world that none of us want. This Parliament is the protection against that; it is our responsibility to prevent such draconian powers being given to authorities, the police, or to anyone else in any part of public life. Although I have disputes with other parties in the House about all sorts of things, including fundamental issues of public policy, I do not think that any party in the House would want to do the sorts of things that it is being suggested we are opening up the opportunity for a Government to do. If we ever get a Government who are prepared to do such things, they will find a way of doing them whether or not there are ID cards or a register of individuals.
We ought not to deny ourselves the opportunity of having certainty in terms of proving our own and other people's identities because of something that may happen 10 years hence. Another distinguishing feature of the debate on Second Reading was that the majority of those who criticised us wanted to have a discussion about what they thought would happen in 10 years' time rather than now.
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