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Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon) (Con): Some countries do have identity cards, but they are not necessary compulsory. My wife is a French citizen. She is not domiciled in the United Kingdom, but she is resident here. Many years ago, her identity card expired and she found it impossible to get a new one. She asked whether the authorities would take her passport in evidence. They said that they would not, because it was un titre de transport and not evidence that she existed. When she needed to renew her passport, that was done without identity card evidence being produced. Therefore, the system in France is much more voluntary than that which the Minister has, very honestly, said that he envisages for the UK.
Mr. Browne: I am no expert on the details of identity card systems around the world. I suspect that if the right hon. Gentleman were living with his French-born wife in France rather than being resident in the UK, we might have some questions about whether to give him an identity card under this scheme. I understand the relationship between residence and identity cards.
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Mr. Curry: My wife pays tax in France.
Mr. Browne: The organisation of the right hon. Gentleman's family affairs and whether they are prepared to pay tax in two countries is for them to decide. I make no comment about that.
We could go into greater detail for other purposes about voluntarism and compulsory cards. Some countries have voluntary cards and others have compulsory cards. It is interesting that the concerns that some people express about a creeping process associated with identity cards is not supported by evidence in any countries that have them. Most of the countries that had voluntary cards still have voluntary cards; they did not progress to compulsory cards.
In the EU, 21 out of 25 countries have ID cards. Enhanced security features for passports are a priority for our international partners, and we will launch a British passport incorporating a facial biometric later this year. Across the world, there is a drive for more security. The Italians, the Spanish, the Greeks and the Portuguese already record fingerprints during the identity card issuing process, and some of them record the fingerprint on the card. There is an increasing interest in the role of iris recognition; the Germans are particularly keen to explore that. Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden are closely examining incorporating biometrics in an identity card. Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany are running visa trials involving biometric registration. EU member states routinely fingerprint asylum seekers. A number of non-European countries also use biometrics: Hong Kong and the Philippines use fingerprint biometrics in their identity cards. Around the world, biometrics are increasingly being used for this purpose.
That sets the importance of the Bill in the appropriate context for the UK in economic terms, because this is a serious opportunity. It would be a dereliction of the Government's duty if we did not play our part in ensuring that we moved at the pace of developments being made across the world. Apart from anything else, there will be increasing opportunities from around the world for companies to develop expertise and sell it on internationally. The UK is constantly accused of being too late in some of those technological areas, but recently we have got much better in that regard, and we should not lose that.
Amendment No. 152 would mean that an individual might be required, for the purposes of renewing a card under clause 9, to allow not just fingerprints and other biometric information about himself to be taken and recorded, but all his fingerprints. The hon. Member for Woking and those who support him should be satisfied that the amendment is not necessary, as we could already require any biometric that the Secretary of State thinks fit for the purposes of verifying the information placed in the register. It is our intention to use not eight but all 10 fingerprints for that purpose. That is how the biometric trial was configured, and that is what we intend for the future, for the obvious reason that that increases security.
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The amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam, would either not make it possible to require an individual to provide any biometrics, in the case of amendments Nos. 79 and 97, or, in the case of amendments Nos. 80 and 98, would allow a requirement to record the fingerprint biometric only, in order to satisfy the application requirement of clause 5 and the notification requirements of clause 12. Amendments Nos. 116 and 117 would mean that no biometric information could be provided for the register, even with the consent of the individual; for example, for the purposes of verifying identity when opening a bank account. Yet again, the hon. Gentleman has come up with amendments that would disconnect biometrics from the identity card scheme. He is seeking grossly to undermine the scheme—as he would, of course, because of his party's aim to wreck the whole thing.
It is not surprising that the Government's view is that the hon. Gentleman's amendments would severely limit the benefits of the scheme and represent serious threats to its security. I could go on to explain why, but the hon. Gentleman knows fine well why, because it was his intention that they should. It is the intention of the Government to preserve security and the correlation between biometrics and the information on identity gathered from persons in the way that I explained.
A further consequence of those amendments is worthy of note: they would restrict the incorporation of biometrics of the future in the Bill. The fact is that we accept that this technology, although proven to be effective in large-scale trials and operations, is comparatively young. In future, we may develop biometrics that are superior to, or more convenient than, the best biometrics that we can gather at present. If the Bill were tied to a particular biometric technology, it would not be possible to take advantage of any new technologies without further legislation. That would be an inappropriate and inadvisable position for the Government to allow the scheme to get into.
For all those reasons, an if hon. Members are satisfied that I have responded sufficiently and appropriately to the issues that they have raised, I invite the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam to withdraw his amendment, which I resist.
Mr. Allan: I join other hon. Members in welcoming you the Chair, Ms Anderson.
I compliment the Minister once again on being sharp enough to rumble the Liberal Democrats' cunning plan to derail the Government's scheme for identity cards. His summing up was interesting, in that he was quite clear that there is still huge uncertainty on the subject. That is why we wanted to debate it in Committee. He set out an interesting additional argument for proceeding with biometrics: the US Federal Government defence spending argument. There has been a long-running debate between British and American hi-tech companies about the fact that that US Government use such spending to shove contracts the way of American companies and give them a boost. Such an argument might be relevant in
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the context of the British debate, except that this Government do not offer any certainty that any contract will go to a UK company. Therefore, we do not know where the money will eventually go.
I appreciated the contributions of the hon. Members for Woking and for Newark. They seemed to be arguing for a very old technology maxim—always buy version two. Never buy version one; let other people take the pain. The hon. Member for Woking referred to the point that banks looked at biometrics before coming up with chip and pin as an alternative. That is a helpful example of where the debate needs to go.
I have started to understand that a distinction can be drawn. We could require biometrics for registration, to stop people getting on to the database unnecessarily. The hon. Member for Dover (Mr. Prosser) talked about asylum seekers; perhaps I did him an injustice. I asked who would want to get on to the asylum seeker database. Of course, no British citizen would want to get on it once, but plenty of asylum seekers might want to get on it twice, and that, I think, was his point. I can understand why biometrics might perform a gatekeeper function, but that is distinct from whether or not they will be used at the points of access to public services.
Mr. Browne: I am conscious that I have only just sat down, but the hon. Gentleman reminded me that I did not deal with the issue of chip and pin, which he raised. There is no reason why the ID card cannot use chip and pin. It would use it in addition to biometrics, because there is an obvious vulnerability of chip and pin: people can steal one's pin number.
Mr. Allan: That is a helpful clarification of the sort that we were trying to tease out with the amendments.
There a number of different ways in which the presentation of the card might take place. In a sense, passports contain a biometric—the photo of a face—and we use our eyes to scan whether or not the face matches that of the person. We are moving towards computed biometrics—numeric biometrics rather than the other sort. However, that does not mean that on many occasions the photo identification is not the only one we need and we do not need to bother with all this other stuff.
The concerns remain. The false matches raise concerns about security, because one of the temptations may be to allow people fast access through passport control on the basis of using biometrics, rather than checking them visibly. A false match clearly opens a potential security loophole in that somebody might go through who perhaps should not.
The false non-matches raise different concerns. They are more about one presenting oneself for a service or for access to something, handing over the card, going through the scanning process and the operator looking up and saying, ''The computer says no.'' One might be presented with a situation where one cannot gain access to a service. It might be that one looks like the person on the card but the computer has returned a false negative.
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Those concerns exist, but they will be fleshed out in discussions about the use of the card. At this stage, we have tested the Government's intentions on biometrics as far as we can, but there will be plenty of other questions as we come to later clauses that deal with the situations in which one has to present the ID cards. We will want to continue to test whether the Government are, again, going for an overkill solution, which far exceeds the identification requirements of those particular transactions. I will not press the matter to a Division at this stage, and I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
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