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Mr. Malins: May I take the Minister back not to the identity card, which comes later, but to the register and the question of police powers? If a police officer who is trying to prevent or detect a low-level crime chooses to access the register in order to check my identity, is that officer entitled only to have confirmation that I am on the register or is he entitled to all the information about me that is on the register?
Mr. Browne: In those circumstances, if a police officer were allowed to do that—and we will address where he can do that in more detail later—he would only be allowed to establish identity.
Mr. Malins: Nothing else?
Mr. Browne: Nothing else—although there is a provision that would allow police officers investigating serious crime to get access to more detailed information in certain circumstances. However, with respect, we should properly deal with that when we come to it. It is important to deal with the powers in the context of the relevance of the purposes, which is why we are having this debate. I do not want to anticipate all the debates, because I can see, from the amendments that have been tabled, that we will have significant debates about some of the powers, and rightly so.
There is no power in the Bill to require the production of an ID card to a police officer and no new power for the police to demand to know someone's identity. The scheme will allow the police to check people's fingerprints when they are already entitled to do so against the national identity register—for example, if a person is under arrest—but only if they have already checked against the records on the police national computer to which they have access.
The police will have to exercise the powers that they currently have and, if they have not been able to ascertain identity that way, only then will they be able to gain access to the register to check a person's identity. Because we all carry our biometric information with us, as the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam said, there is no need for the police to carry out such a check or for a person to have a card in their possession, although it would help if they carried their card and were prepared to assist the police by proving their identity to the highest possible standard. In terms of the detection and prevention of crime, that facility and security alone will undoubtedly mean that the police will save a significant amount of time, which they would otherwise have to expend in checking people's identity to the level that satisfies them if they have a relationship with those people and even when those people are volunteering the information.
The Bill also sets limits on the information that can be held on the register. Can we all finally agree that this is not a Big Brother database? Unless the information meets the requirements of clause 1(5) and schedule 1, it cannot be held on the register. No criminal convictions, medical records or bank details can be held. There is a mechanism in the Bill that operates in relation to the registration of information and makes that clear, but there is one minor qualification. We have left open the possibility that people may, in
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future, voluntarily put information about themselves on the register, such as the fact that they are an organ donor or have a particular blood group. As one hon. Member said, a constituent argued that it would be helpful if information about a child who suffered from a potentially fatal allergy were held on the card. [Interruption.] Not political affiliation. We will deal with voluntary information when it is appropriate to do so.
I shall now move on to the specific provisions and amendments and deal with some of the arguments. Before doing so, however, I say to my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) that the registration of birth became compulsory in Northern Ireland in 1864—although it was part of Ireland then. I am grateful to have covered my embarrassment on that so quickly.
I am grateful to hon. Members for tabling the amendments, because they enable us to discuss in some detail—as they expected—what we mean by ''the public interest'' in the second limb of the statutory purpose of the identity card scheme that is set out in clause 1(3)(b) and, by dint of that, they enable me to address some of the issues of proportionality.
The clause makes it clear that one of the statutory purposes of the national identity register, which underpins the ID card scheme, is to facilitate the provisions of a secure, reliable method for identity or registrable facts to be verified or ascertained where there is a public interest. Before we move on, I remind hon. Members that the first limb of the statutory purpose is the voluntary limb, which we have already discussed.
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Amendment No. 1 would make five changes to the purposes of the scheme. Some of the other amendments in the group make consequential changes, and I shall not go into them, as they follow the principal amendment as night follows day. Although I understand the reasoning behind them, I believe that they are unnecessary or, in some cases, would seriously undermine some of the benefits that the ID card scheme would provide in the wider public interest.
The first change is the addition of the prevention or detection of terrorism to the reference to national security in subsection (4)(a). Before I come to that, I will deal with the challenge thrown to me to show how an ID register, the ability to issue a card relating to it, and the use of that card as a point of access to facts on the register, would interdict terrorism. We know from information provided by security services and the police that terrorists try to use false identities in order to evade surveillance and arrest, and to facilitate activities such as moving money around and finding safe houses. That supports their terrorist activities. One key benefit of the introduction of the register and ID card scheme is that it will make it much harder for people to do those things.
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I pray in aid the experience of the Spanish Government, interestingly enough. People say that ID cards have not assisted Spain in any way in facing down or dealing with terrorism. We get an irritatingly facile argument: there were bombs in Madrid; there are ID cards in Spain; therefore, ID cards cannot do anything to help interdict terrorism.
I am seriously tempted to resort to an equally facile argument in response; indeed, I did so once, and I will repeat it: there are police officers and security services in Spain; there were bombs in Spain; therefore, police officers and security services are no use in fighting terrorism. That argument is nonsense. To my knowledge, no one who has deployed that argument has yet asked the Spanish Government whether the existence of identity cards was of any assistance to them in fighting terrorism. That would have been a relevant question, because that country has a long and sustained history of internal terrorism. I asked that question, and the Spanish Government told me that the existence of identity cards had significantly restricted the activities of terrorists and had significantly assisted the police and security services in tracking them down and bringing them to book for their offences, and helped to interdict offences.
The fact that terrorists may—or may not—have gotten away with terrorist atrocities since the introduction of ID cards does not alter the fact that the Spanish Government are clear that the cards have helped them. We should bear in mind the number of convicted terrorists in Spanish jails.
Patrick Mercer: I do not know whether this will be of any assistance to the Minister, but the incident on 11 March last year was the mirror image of an incident that ETA tried to put into practice the previous Christmas. The Spanish security forces were able to catch up with and prevent the ETA incident just over a year ago because a reliable series of facts was known about ETA. I come back to a point that I made earlier: the Spanish police were able to use their equivalent of the register and of the ID card to tie down an organisation about which they knew quite a lot, and whose activities had similarities with those undertaken recently by paramilitaries in Ulster. I support the Minister in what he is saying about assisting in the fight against terrorism, but that did not help the Spanish police when it came to the new form of terrorism that we face.
Mr. Browne: We shall have to wait for the Spanish police and security services' experience of the new form of terrorism, and the role that identity cards did or did not play in that, to come out in the wash. None of us are in a position to say exactly what role identity cards played in the apparent effectiveness of the Spanish police in tracking down the people responsible—although there was another incident in which a significant number of suspects were killed—because that information has not been shared. I am not prepared to speculate about that. However, we need to address the argument that Spain has identity cards, that Spain had a terrorist incident and that therefore identity cards cannot help in any way.
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We also need to put the issue into context: nobody suggests that identity cards are a panacea for or a solution to terrorism. However, they will make a significant contribution. We should look to the people to whom we normally look for advice on such issues—particularly to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who says that the cards will help. We have to trust the judgments of such people, because we trust them when we make many other important decisions. I am much more content to trust the judgments of such people than those of people who make the arguments that I have heard repeatedly in this context, who leave them stuck to the wall, walk away from them and do not want to support them.
Mr. Malins: May I gently chide the Minister? He has produced some cogent arguments on identity cards, but they relate more to clause 8. He has been talking continually about identity cards. I come back to the register. We are asking the Minister how the register, specifically, will help in the prevention of terrorism. Will it? We want the Minister to persuade us. For that matter, did Spain and other countries have the sort of identity register—separate from a card—that is being set up under this Bill?
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