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Mr. Clarke: My hon. Friend is entirely right and I completely accept his main point. This is not, as Lord Strathclyde suggested, a minor issue; it is a major one and the intention is to destroy the whole scheme.
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con) rose—
Mr. Clarke: That is also the intention of the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), who will now set out why he wants to destroy the ID card system as a whole and break the conventions of Parliament.
Mr. Garnier:
I am very grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way because it enables me to prevent him from carrying on unwittingly misleading this House. He insists on repeating the canard that the biometric passport obligation has something to do with the national identity register system that he wishes to set up.
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The obligation under the biometric passport system is to provide a system whereby passport officers can read biometrics at the port of entry; it has nothing whatever to do with the entry into the national identity register system that this Government are trying to achieve by stealth. If only they would come clean, they would have a much more sympathetic audience.
Mr. Clarke: That is entirely wrong. We discussed this issue earlier this week and we will continue to do so.
Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey) (LD): Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Clarke: I shall not give way any more at this stage.
I return to what Lord Strathclyde said in the other place yesterday, because it is important. I believe that I have addressed each of the three points that he made. As I said earlier, he made it clear that the Lords should not proceed if there are issues to do with the Salisbury convention. He said that if the Government were not prepared to back down or to find a compromise, the only option was for the unelected House to force the Government to use the Parliament Act procedure to ensure that the will of the elected House prevails.
The Parliament Act has been used four times since 1949, and Lord Strathclyde is not right to suggest that we have reached the point where that option should be invoked. For the three reasons that he himself gives in columns 1244 and 1245 of the Official Report of yesterday's Lords debate, the other place should indeed think again, just as this place should decide to insist on its own position.
Simon Hughes: Will the Home Secretary give way on that point?
Mr. Clarke: In a moment. My fourth point is that the Lords amendments would impose an additional burden and cost on the plans for the introduction of ID cards that were approved by this House. It cannot be right for the constituents whom we represent to be denied by those whom they did not elect and cannot remove the most cost-effective option in implementing a scheme. In effect, the Lords voted for the establishment of two parallel biometric databases, with all the cost, inconvenience, confusion and insecurity that that approach involves. That raises the question of whether the unelected House has the right directly to place such burdens on our constituents.
The remaining issue is, essentially, a constitutional one: whether it is right for the other place to keep insisting on amendments that have been rejected here twice already, and that will be rejected again today.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab):
Such a scheme would not only impose additional costs, which is an issue that clearly exercised the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) earlier; we would also end up with two databases, one unprotected and the other protected by the national identity scheme commissioner. Is that not what the Lords are advocating?
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Mr. Clarke: That is completely right. The effect of the Lords amendment would be precisely as my hon. Friend says. If it were passed, the protections that this Bill provides for the national identity register would not be available for the biometric passport register.
Simon Hughes: The Home Secretary referred to our exchange on Monday. If Lord Strathclyde is right to say that the Lords should act only when there is a significant amount of public support, may I remind the right hon. Gentleman that the latest poll that he cited shows that public support for the position taken by the Lords is 10 per cent. higher than was the support for his party at the general election? The numbers in respect of the share of those who voted are about the same, so he surely cannot argue that the Government are justified on this issue, and that the House of Lords is not?
The Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality (Mr. Tony McNulty): That does not make sense.
Mr. Clarke: My right hon. Friend is right about the Liberal Democrat arithmetic. The situation is very simple. I repeat that Lord Strathclyde made it clear that the Lords should frustrate the will of the Commons only when there is a "good deal" of public support for what the Lords was doing. The NO2ID campaign is opposed to our policy, but that organisation set the questions in the poll, in which more than half the country said that it did not support the campaign.
I studied yesterday's Divisions in the Lords carefully, to establish how opinion had moved between the votes on 6 and 15 March. There was almost no change in the position of those peers who are whipped by the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties. On 6 March, 190 peers—principally Tories and Liberal Democrats—were against the Government position. Yesterday, that number rose to 194—almost no change.
The peers who are not whipped—the Cross Benchers and the bishops—voted on 6 March by 37 to 12 against the Government position, but yesterday a majority was clearly in favour of supporting and not frustrating the Commons' position. [Interruption.] In answer to the hilarity among Opposition Members, I have to add in fairness that there were only four bishops in the total of more than 50 Cross-Bench peers. They were not significant in the arithmetic, although their significance may lie in the guidance that they get from yet another place.
My point is that it was the whipped Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers who voted to frustrate the elected House and overthrow the Government's position. That was what happened, and I urge my colleagues to sustain the Government's position. I also urge the Opposition to stop trying to frustrate the will of the people.
David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con):
The Home Secretary wants to represent the process in which we are engaged today as a clash between the House of Lords and the democratic will of the people, as represented by the Government. Hon. Members should put to one side the fact that this House of Lords is, after eight years, effectively the Government's creation, and
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that the opposition to this aspect of the Bill is driven by a belief in the ancient liberties of the British people. The right hon. Gentleman gave us some numbers, but they demonstrate that that belief transcends party. It drives an opposition that encompasses all parties, including Cross Benchers—
David Davis: Yes: the Home Secretary said that a majority of peers—Cross Benchers, Liberal, Labour and Conservative peers—were against the proposal, not that all of them were. That is another factor that we must put to one side. To justify his stance as the representative of the people, the right hon. Gentleman is forced to pretend that the Bill exactly reflects the Labour party manifesto, but that point was destroyed by the hon. Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove), who was such a senior person in the Labour party during the election.
The words of the Labour manifesto are clear.
Anne Snelgrove: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
David Davis: I will in a moment, as I have referred to the hon. Lady. I did not know that Labour Members were so sensitive these days, but there we are.
The words of the Labour manifesto are clear. It states that ID cards will be
The key word is "voluntary", and we shall return to it time and again in the next five or 10 minutes. The Home Secretary has been forced to declare that the ID card is effectively voluntary.
Anne Snelgrove: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
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