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John Robertson: I am interested to hear the hon. Gentleman's point. Was it made because he and the hon. Member for Woking are kindred spirits on the Bill?
Mr. Allan: From a political point of view, I would be pleased if Conservative Members came round to our way of thinking, because it clearly would make for more exciting progress on the Bill in another place,
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even if we could not quite muster the numbers in this House to amend it substantially. However, perhaps more Labour Members will also come round to our way of thinking.
Mr. Malins: Following the point made by the hon. Gentleman, I have said throughout my parliamentary career that I have much in common on several issues with people in other parties of good will and good sense. One of the problems with the parliamentary system is that we seem perpetually to be at each other's throats when, on some occasions, we agree. I have often thought that the hon. Gentleman has spoken sensibly about several issues. I hope I do not get into trouble for saying that.
Mr. Allan: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is late in the day and we have been here for a long time, but I was energised during our comfort break by an encounter with two young constituents of my neighbour, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Helen Jackson). They were so concerned about the proceedings on the Bill that they had prepared some good briefing notes on their worry. They met the Minister and the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough and, at her expense, had come down to express their views. That helps to set our proceedings in context: they are important to people outside the House, even if they do not always seem to be.
Amendment No. 186 covers some important principles that deal with how we charge people for public services. Because we charge people for passports and driving licences, a lazy assumption has been made that somehow that is not public money or taxation and that we should read that across to ID cards. We could equally come at the matter from the other end and say that we do not charge people for a national insurance number card, a national health service card or going on to the electoral register. In common with other arguments that I have advanced in Committee, there is a fundamental difference here between a universal service and a service that only a number of people take up voluntarily. Our amendment targets specifically those who are brought into the scheme on a compulsory basis.
There is a difference. The reason that we charge for passports and driving licences is that they were the preserve of the privileged. The number of people who have them may have grown, but there was an important distinction between universal services available free at the point of delivery and the privileged services for which a small number of people were expected to pay. With ID cards, we are moving into the former territory of the universal service.
When we debate later clauses, we will consider specifically whether public services can be made conditional on the possession of an ID card. There is a legitimate argument that, if one is making a service such as the NHS conditional on having an ID card and there is a charge for that card, that starts to undermine the principle of free at the point of delivery. Good arguments can be made in principle on why we should charge people for the cards.
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We should not fool ourselves that the money is somehow not public money. I equate a charge that everyone must incur universally as being comparable with the council tax, for example, Everyone incurs a charge for that. It is public money. If we make matters compulsory universally, it is not money that is outside the public realm, so it is important that we are discussing matters in the context of something that is compulsory. All citizens, and non-citizens too—everyone who is resident in the country—will have to incur such expenditure so, in a sense, it is public money. We could go to them and say that we want them to give us money for policing or for something else. We do that on a regular basis and such matters are all discretionary. We should not exempt this case and say that we can collect money for ID cards but not for something else. It is all of a kind, and we should bear that in mind.
Amendment No. 186 seeks to exclude those who are required to be compulsorily registered, but I suspect that the Government will have to do something like that anyway. This is the freeview version of the ID card, and the Government will have to come up with something cheap or free if they are going to be able, with public support, to deal with people left at the end of the process. I find it hard to envisage a situation in which they will be able to bring in legislation or orders that allow them to insist that everybody in the non-passport holding category of people in the country come forward and pay £50, £60 or whatever it will be for an ID card—by that time we will be talking about a lot of money if full cost recovery applies. That will be difficult.
Given the Government's model for funding, I am concerned about the extent to which they will feel unconstrained in how they let the system develop. We are concerned that it will develop out of all control in terms of the costs required to implement it. One has to be more concerned if the notion is that any additional costs will be passed on to the public. The Government may not feel constrained to limit costs because there is a cash cow and they can pass costs on to the public, but I am not convinced that that is a healthy attitude with which to approach the problem.
In the context of clause 8 there is a fundamental question about whether the cards need to be issued at all. Until now, we have been talking about the national identity register, and it is clear that a lot of the benefits that the Government seek to achieve come from the register rather than the card. Costs will be incurred issuing cards to people who do not want them, and the whole process of chasing people up, finding them, sending out orders and going through appeals processes is certainly not cost free. I am not sure how much that makes sense given that a lot of the benefits that the Government seek to obtain, particularly law enforcement benefits, will come from the database and biometrics and not from the card at all. The card is almost incidental to the benefits that the Government are seeking to achieve.
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Mr. Mole: I was minded to pose this question to the hon. Member for Woking. Given the consent that I have sensed through the debate during the past two days in Committee from all parties for a biometric passport, would the hon. Gentleman accept that the costs pertinent to the biometric passport should be levied through a charge in the same way that a charge is currently made for a passport?
Mr. Allan: As I explained earlier, I recognise passports as being in a different category; it is voluntary to obtain them, which makes them different from a compulsory ID card. I have no objections in principle to the cost recovery for the passport, but we are considering extending that principle to a category of people who neither wish nor need to have a passport, and yet on whom we are potentially seeking to impose costs.
The Minister has expressed his confidence in the Bill and its legal structures, but we are on nothing like as confident ground when we come to the costs. I could summarise the exchange in the Select Committee that the hon. Member for Woking referred to as follows: the hon. Member for Walsall, North asks, ''So what's it going to cost then?'' and the Home Office official replies, ''Er, er, er, we are not sure yet.'' We do not seem to be much further on in that debate. Most figures that we have seem to have been thrown into the air.
I reiterate my earlier call for us to be given information, particularly the gateway reviews. The reviews are carried out by the Office of Government Commerce using public money and are supposed to be the authoritative reviews that decide whether a project should go ahead. I cannot believe that at this stage they include anything of significant commercial confidentiality—or confidential commerciality, as the hon. Member for Woking said earlier—that would mean that we should not see them. That is the kind of information that I would have confidence in. If we are going to be on firm ground when debating the subject, it would be helpful to be able to discuss something from the Office of Government Commerce.
Some Government schemes come in under budget and on time. Those that do not tend to be the ones that are overly complex, involve a great deal of novelty and contain a large number of unknowns. This project has perhaps the largest number of unknowns and the greatest novelty and complexity of any that I have seen. If the Bill is not amended in either way, because of the current Government model of cost recovery, significant bills will fall on citizens which they will have reason to feel aggrieved about, because they will not have been sufficiently involved in giving their consent to that expenditure.
If the Government stick to their full cost recovery model, my advice to them would be to get in early. It should be to get in early or to get in late, but I think that it will be to get in early. If the system works as they intend, I think that initially they will set a fairly low price for the cards, but that the costs will ramp up. If they pass the costs on, they will ramp up significantly and are then likely to fall afterwards. That is the model that any normal business goes through. It starts to
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deliver something, it is not sure what the price is—I think that, politically, the Government will put in a loss leader price—the costs go up and then they fall afterwards. The costs could fall even further if the Government have enough confidence in their business model to pass any savings made in other areas over to this budget. I should be interested to hear whether that is the Government's intention. If they make savings in, for example, the costs of identity checking in the Department for Work and Pensions or in the health service, will they pass those savings back? The individual has paid for the card. If, by virtue of having that card, money is saved for the other Departments, it is right that that should be given back.
My fear is that, rather than have a hump of costs that we will pass on, it will be a steadily increasing line, an uphill slope. That means that those who come in early and go through the passport structure will get a reasonable fee. My suspicion is that, for political reasons, the Government will try to cover it up, pass the money on to the public purse and take it from other areas of potential expenditure. However, if they stick to the full cost recovery model, by the time they get to compulsion and the 20 per cent. of potentially poorest people, they would have to make significant charges, if they were honest about it. I am not sure what will happen, but I think that I would be fairly safe if I were to put a significant bet on the eventual costs of the scheme being considerably more than any of the figures given to us to date and a significant part of those costs falling on the poorest members of our society.
The amendments address that issue, and I hope that the Minister will be able to respond in a way that gives us more confidence by perhaps releasing more of the information that I suspect has been prepared in the Home Office, on which we should like to be able to base our comments.
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