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The Chairman: Before we move on to the next group of amendments, it might be convenient for Members and those who serve us if I let it be known that I intend to suspend the sitting at 4.30 pm for 20 minutes, and at 7.30 pm for the dinner break. The Committee will, of course, adjourn at the Government's pleasure.
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Conway. I understood from my discussion through the usual channels and elsewhere that we were happy for the Committee to sit through until 6.30 pm without a break, and for it to terminate then. What has happened to change that arrangement?
The Chairman: The suspension of the Committee is a matter for the Chair, and the usual channels can debate between themselves when they want to draw
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stumps, as it were. I have also been informed that the Minister might move a motion relating to our sitting times, and the Clerk has to be able to prepare that and circulate it to the Committee. Members must also have some concern for those who serve us; it is not unreasonable to break after two or three hours if the Committee can sit indefinitely, which it can tonight—and, as far as the Chair is concerned, it may well do so. Therefore, we will suspend at 4.30 pm, as advised.
Mr. Allan: I beg to move amendment No. 69, in page 2, line 6, at end insert
(b) an address at which he can be contacted.'.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 68, in page 2, line 7, leave out paragraphs (b) to (i).
No. 6, in page 2, line 8, leave out 'and elsewhere'.
No. 7, in page 2, line 10, leave out paragraph (d).
No. 125, in page 2, line 13, leave out paragraph (f).
No. 8, in page 2, line 14, leave out paragraph (g).
No. 126, in page 2, line 14, after 'numbers', insert
'recordable under paragraph 4(1) of Schedule 1'.
No. 9, in page 2, line 18, at end insert—
'but ''registrable facts'' shall not include criminal convictions or cautions or medical records.'.
No. 22, in schedule 1, page 39, line 13, leave out sub-paragraph (g).
No. 25, in page 39, line 15, leave out sub-paragraph (h).
No. 23, in page 39, line 15, leave out 'whether'.
No. 24, in page 39, line 15, leave out 'or elsewhere'.
No. 42, in clause 8, page 7, line 5, leave out 'and'.
No. 43, in page 7, line 7, at end insert
(c) is issued for the following purposes only—
(i) to assist in preventing or detecting terrorist acts in the United Kingdom or elsewhere or otherwise in the interests of national security;
(ii) to assist the Secretary of State in preventing or detecting serious crime;
(iii) the purposes of controlling illegal immigration and enforcing immigration controls;
(iv) the purpose of securing proper provision of the following public services, namely—
(d) social security benefits.
(1A) In subsection (1)(c)(ii), ''serious crime'' has the same meaning as in section 1(1A).'.
Mr. Allan: On the last group of amendments, the Minister issued a robust challenge and made an effective case as to why he felt that the national identity register was no different from what had gone before. I would like to respond to that challenge, particularly with regard to amendments Nos. 68 and 69, and I am sure that we will continue to clash over such issues during the next few days.
Amendments Nos. 68 and 69 can be described as filleting amendments. They remove a whole range of information from the potential national identity register, because we think that the addition of that information represents a significant change from what
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has gone before. The right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) was right to warn us about the dangers of incrementalism. Just because something has happened before, if one is going a step further that does not necessarily mean that that additional step should automatically be acceptable.
The Government have said that they are committed to having an identity card system. If we are to have such a system, it is important that, while addressing the detail of it, we continue to debate what shape it should take. In this clause, the Government have put forward a particular model for a particularly comprehensive identity database, which I will argue, in the context of amendments that remove much of that, goes far beyond what is strictly necessary. I am sure that there are plenty of technical deficiencies in amendments Nos. 68 and 69, but I hope that the sense of them will come through, which is that we want to end up with a far poorer database that contains much less information than that which the Government propose. There are good reasons why less could be more in the context of the database.
There are principled and practical reasons for what we are proposing. In our model, the database has identity characteristics. We should cut through everything and get down to the question of what identity is. The identity of an individual is ultimately simply their physical being, and biometrics are a way of recording that. None of the other characteristics we are talking about—not even names or dates of birth—are unchangeable characteristics of identity. People change their stated dates of birth. There are significant numbers of people who do not know their exact date of birth, and when they are asked to produce it, they come up with a date and that date becomes their date of birth; however, that date cannot strictly speaking be verified in any meaningful way. Names change, and addresses certainly change, and I will focus a lot on why I think the address data are particularly problematic.
The Minister again referred to us looking forward over a period of time, but if we include all the data covered in the database and we project ourselves forward 10 or 20 years, what we have is an incredibly comprehensive intelligence database. In a sense, it is a national suspect database. I understand why, from a policing point of view, that is a very attractive proposition.
That reminds me of the debates that we had about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and the requests by the National Criminal Intelligence Service for internet service providers to record all internet traffic over a period of seven years. I understood why, from a policing point of view, there would be value in that. However, it was incumbent on the Home Office, again following the principles of proportionality and necessity, to argue against the police. It needed to come to a settled view as to what was appropriate and what level of intrusion into an individual's privacy was appropriate to the aims.
In that context, the Government have simply gone too far, particularly in recording the address detail, which is quite important. If we were to follow the
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scheme and record all the information set out in subsection (5)(b) to (i), we would have an intelligence database that would allow an investigating authority to establish not only the identity of an individual—in strict terms, the biometric data—but a complete history of where they had lived. Over time that history would grow.
Again, that is where the proposal is quite different from something like an electoral register database or a birth register, which simply records a specific event in time. We are talking about a comprehensive database that follows us throughout our lives and possibly beyond, because the data will not be destroyed at the point of death. As well as recording information about where an individual lives at any point, it will allow people to perform known associate searches by cross-referencing all the people who lived at particular addresses at certain times.
There is a specific amendment to remove or to test the auditing data provision as well. I recognise that the Government are between a rock and a hard place. Not to have auditing data exposes them to accusations that the data will be accessed and no one will be able to track down a perpetrator—a person who accessed it illegally. To have it significantly adds to the quantity of data that could be used to intrude on someone's privacy. The collection of data on every place that someone has lived and all their known associates who lived in or shared those addresses at a certain time, and the auditing data, means there is a comprehensive intelligence database, which I imagine would be attractive to law enforcement agencies.
Mr. Jones: Do not some of those examples already exist? If one traces birth certificates and cross-references with electoral registers, one can find out where people lived and who lived with them. That situation already exists.
Mr. Allan: I do not disagree that plenty of the data exist already, but I would quite strongly put forward the argument that to require anybody who is performing an investigation to go through certain steps—in other words, not to make it immediately straightforward—is not necessarily a bad thing in a democratic system. Stickiness and complexity in the system is a form of safeguard for the individual citizen against potential abuse.
The Minister has said that we are talking about fanciful circumstances where abuse might occur at some point in the future and the Government could act anyway. However, to have the tools in place—this is one of the fundamental principles behind something like the Data Protection Act 1998—that allow access to happen easily if a malign or malicious Government have taken control, is not something that we want to encourage in law.
In other words, in designing our tools—our Data Protection Act and our databases—we want to ensure that the scope for abuse by malicious forces is as small as possible. It is quite a respectable theory to say that that amount of complexity and stickiness is one of the
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fundamental safeguards that we have in a democratic system. The removal of complexity is in the interests of those who seek to abuse systems. That is a significant argument.
The other argument that people must consider in principle is that we are effectively saying that we will treat everyone as a suspect. We have had serious debates in this place about that. There was a debate about what happens when the police pull someone up because they are genuinely suspicious of them and they take their fingerprint and DNA data. Whether they should keep the data and in what circumstances they can use them was a matter of huge contention.
We are now saying that everybody over the age of 16 will be taken to a place where they will be fingerprinted. The biometric data will be held and it will be associated with a range of other data, which is normally the kind of data the police might hold on files of those whom they suspect of an offence. That will happen in a comprehensive fashion. That is quite a different measure, and a different way of dealing with information from that which has gone before.
4 pm
On the addresses, there are some practical issues about complexity. Specifically, I hope that the Minister can deal with those relating to those of no fixed abode. An important point to establish is the threshold at which one becomes resident somewhere. In our amendments, we put forward the argument that the address data held should be a contact address, rather than all the addresses at which someone might be deemed to have been resident. That is important in establishing how complex the system will be.
At this stage of the afternoon, I do not want to go too far into database theory, but there is a clear distinction between kinds of database. Some, such as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database, might simply hold records that say, for example, ''Mr. Smith, No. 1 Acacia avenue'', and when Mr. Smith changes his address, one deletes that and puts in, ''Mr. Smith, No. 1 High street''.
Another kind of database might record all people and all their addresses. That would create what is called a many-to-many relationship. There is a lot of complex database theory about that called normalisation, but we do not have to go into it now. Suffice it to say that there is great complexity in such a database system, in which there are potentially tens of millions of addresses, and certainly tens of millions of people. Trying to relate them in many-to-many relationships is a nightmare from a technical point of view, and certainly that has not been attempted elsewhere.
When we look at the Government's feasibility study, we see that the nearest comparable systems are those such as the American fingerprinting system, which has tens of millions of records. However, those records are one-to-ones; the entries are effectively ''Mr. Smith'' and then his fingerprint. There will then be other ways of checking where someone lives. Under the Bill, the Government are proposing a hugely complex database for everybody, potentially recording dozens of addresses over people's lifetime.
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From a practical point of view, in terms of how useful the system will be, let us consider someone leaving school. Between the ages of 18 and 25, they may have 10 addresses; some may be very short term indeed. Is the public interest really served by seeking to record every one of those addresses—at huge expense, potentially, because of the complexity of the task—instead of having a simple record of their contact address?
Under our proposal, people could choose that contact address. If it were the parental address, the chances of being able to track that person down or get hold of them, if that was the purpose of the database, would be far greater than through having stored a complex web of 10 or 12 out-of-date addresses.
There is a huge expansion of the purpose of the database in the clause; it is no longer just about identity. If the clause were simply about identity, it would say that the register would record the details of a person's identity—which I accept is probably the biometric data—and associated useful information, such as the name under which someone currently goes, their date of birth and so on, as well as a contact address for that person. Once we get beyond that, we are building an intelligence database that treats all over-16s as potential suspects and holds that data so that it is available as and when the law enforcement agencies seek to use it.
There may be a rationale for doing that; it may be the Government's position that crime and terrorism are, or are likely to become, so serious that keeping such data is strictly necessary, but our view is that it is not currently necessary. I keep reminding the Committee that nothing should be taken as a given; if we choose not to implement this law enforcement tool, it does not mean that we do not wish to enforce the law. It simply means that we wish to release the funds that would be used and spend them on other law enforcement tools that we feel would be far more effective.
A couple of other points need to be mentioned. Subsection (5)(g) on the numbers that can be recorded mentions
''information about numbers allocated to him for identification purposes and about the documents to which they relate''.
I refer to the Minister's comment about national health service and criminal records data explicitly not being in the database. If numbers are to be held, what numbers are we talking about? Are we talking about numbers relating to registrable documents such as passports—in other words, part of the whole ID card package—or are we saying that identification numbers, like NHS or criminal records numbers, could be included in the database under subsection (5)(g)? If the latter is the case, that would be of concern.
One could go through the database and see whether a person has a criminal records number allocated to them. If they have, by definition they have a criminal record; if not, they presumably do not have one. Immediately, potentially sensitive data are held in the database by virtue of having the identification number, rather than the data associated with it. It would be helpful to have more clarity on the numbers spelled out
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in subsection (5)(g), which is one of the measures that we seek to remove with our amendment. Some additional clarity on what the Government mean by the audit trail in paragraph (h) would also be helpful: do they mean it to be all-encompassing? What data will be held in the database and what will they look like? We said at the beginning that the detail is important.
I understand that the Minister will say that with these amendments we are seeking to wreck the national identity register, but we should be looking at different forms for the national identity register; we should not take the Government's form as the only possible option. It is important that we seriously question whether a national identity register that is simply about saying, ''I have the right person in front of me,'' should be expanded to include a huge amount of additional intelligence that is useful for the police, intrusive to the individual and not strictly necessary for the purposes of identity.
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