The
Committee consisted of the following
Members:
Binley,
Mr. Brian
(Northampton, South)
(Con)
Blunt,
Mr. Crispin
(Reigate)
(Con)
Campbell,
Mr. Alan
(Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's
Treasury)
Clegg,
Mr. Nick
(Sheffield, Hallam)
(LD)
Davidson,
Mr. Ian
(Glasgow, South-West)
(Lab/Co-op)
Godsiff,
Mr. Roger
(Birmingham, Sparkbrook and Small Heath)
(Lab)
Green,
Damian
(Ashford)
(Con)
Gwynne,
Andrew
(Denton and Reddish)
(Lab)
Havard,
Mr. Dai
(Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney)
(Lab)
Henderson,
Mr. Doug
(Newcastle upon Tyne, North)
(Lab)
Heyes,
David
(Ashton-under-Lyne)
(Lab)
Hillier,
Meg
(Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home
Department)
Iddon,
Dr. Brian
(Bolton, South-East)
(Lab)
Mullin,
Mr. Chris
(Sunderland, South)
(Lab)
Rowen,
Paul
(Rochdale)
(LD)
Swire,
Mr. Hugo
(East Devon)
(Con)
Walter,
Mr. Robert
(North Dorset)
(Con)
Alan
Sandall, Committee
Clerk
attended the Committee
Tenth
Delegated Legislation
Committee
Wednesday 18
July
2007
[Miss
Anne Begg
in the
Chair]
Draft Verification of Information in Passport Applications Etc. (Specified Persons) Order 2007
2.30
pm
The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Meg
Hillier):
I beg to
move,
That the
Committee has considered the draft Verification of Information in
Passport Applications Etc. (Specified Persons) Order
2007.
May I say what a
pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship for the first time
since I became a Minister, Miss Begg? I am sure that you will keep in
order the vast numbers of us in this room who are anxious to discuss
the proposal. I welcome other members of the Committee to the
debate.
The purpose of
the order is to ensure that the Government have sufficient information
to be able to confirm the identity of passport applicants through the
Identity and Passport Service. It refers to section 38 of the Identity
Cards Act 2006, which gives the power to require information to be
provided by specified organisations, and allows the Identity and
Passport Service, acting on behalf of the Home Secretary, to verify
information in connection with a passport application. It will also
help to determine whether to withdraw an individuals passport,
but I stress that the main use is verification, as the withdrawal of a
passport is very rare; it is usually because some small error has crept
in, although occasionally it is for national security reasons. It is
about verifying that the person being interviewed is who they say they
are.
Section
38 already covers all Government Departments, but it also enables the
power in that section to be extended to specified, non-government
bodies by secondary legislation, which is the reason for this
Committee. The order will extend it to two non-government bodies. The
first is the Registrar General for England and Wales, which is
responsible for the General Register Office for England and Wales.
Although a public body, it is not a Government Department so it is not
at present covered by section
38.
The
General Register Office and the Identity and Passport Service already
have a relationship for tackling fraud in passport applications. The
GRO provides details of all child deaths to the Identity and Passport
Service, which prevents imposters from pretending to be someone who is
already dead. The order extends that relationship in the way I have
described.
However,
we need to extend checks to guard against passport and identity fraud.
As part of that approach, we are introducing interviews for adult
first-time applicants. To date, we have interviewed 800 people in live
pilots and there will be 69 offices up and down the
country. I can provide hon. Members with details afterwards if they are
interested.
The
inclusion of the Registrar General for England and Wales in the order
will put beyond doubt our ability to obtain information about births,
marriages or deaths in order to confirm the identity of an applicant at
an interview. It will ensure that there is no legal obstacle to the
extent of the information that may be provided. At present,
when we check passport applications, we can check that information, but
the order puts it on a statutory footing.
We have had questions about the
use of other data. For the avoidance of doubt, I make it clear that
there is absolutely no intention of using the powers in the order to
obtain any census information from the Registrar General for England
and Wales. The census will shortly be transferring to the new
Statistics Board, created under the Statistics and Registration Service
Bill, but even after that transfer there is no plan to use census
information to verify passport applications. The census is used only
for statistical purposes and it is important that people have
confidence that the information is held in the strictest confidence. In
any case, it would tend to be out of date if it were used for the
purposes of the order. It is therefore of no interest to the passport
service.
For
the sake of completeness, I should mention Northern Ireland and
Scotland, which are not covered by the order because the General
Register Office for Northern Ireland is already covered under section
38(3)(c), which refers to a Northern Ireland
department. The General Register Office for Scotland was given
wide powers in the Local Electoral Administration and Registration
Services (Scotland) Act 2006 to provide that sort of information to
other public bodies or office holders and to charge when necessary, so
it does not need to be
included.
The second
body covered by the order is a credit reference agency with which the
Identity and Passport Service has a contract for the provision of
information. No private sector organisations are currently covered by
section 38, which is why we are using the order to include the agency.
With passport interviews rolling out, we want to extend the amount of
background information that we can obtain to verify identity. The order
will ensure that we are able to do that. The Identity and Passport
Service has a contract with Equifaxa leading credit reference
agency for the provision of that sort of information. The order is
drafted so that the power can be applied to a different credit
reference agency if the contract changes, but it will apply only to the
single credit reference agency with which the Home Office has a
contract at any time. The Office of the Information Commissioner said
that we should clarify that point, so I reiterate that the power will
apply only to one such agency at a
time.
The order will
provide absolute clarity that the organisations concerned have a legal
power to provide the requested information, because section 38 of the
enabling Act creates a statutory duty to do so. We have been checking
passport applications against certain other data, but the order makes
it fully legal for the relevant bodies to provide such information.
They have co-operated fully and it has been legal, but the order makes
the situation clear in statute.
Section 38
covers the provision of data to verify information provided to the
Secretary of State in connection with a passport application. In such
circumstances, the credit reference agency might provide information
about previous addresses at which the applicant has lived recently,
thus allowing the interviewer to ask questions such as Where
did you live five years ago? in passport interviews. It would
also help to confirm that the person attending the interview is the
person who made the application and is applying in true identity. There
has recently been publicity about people sitting driving tests for
others, so we know that it is not beyond the ken of people to try such
tricks with passport applications. The measures will help us to tackle
that problem.
For
first-time applicants, who might be younger and might not have a
strong, or indeed any, credit record, we will be able to ask questions
about their parents, which should, I hope, deal with any problems that
arise with application forms.
All the
measures will be data protection-compliant. The order ensures that all
personal data collected are lawful under the Data Protection Act 1998
and that any extraneous information that is not part of the application
form will be destroyed immediately the interview is concluded and the
passport has been properly issued. Any personal information that is
held will be held under the Act, but some will be used simply for the
interview.
People
sometimes worry what information credit reference agencies hold about
them. Anyone can check their own credit record at such agencies, but I
stress that the Identity and Passport Service cannot ask for irrelevant
information such as details of an individuals credit rating or
financial circumstances. It cannot ask the agency to supply details
about how much money someone has in their bank account, for example, so
that a passport interview officer can ask an applicant that question at
interview. It can ask for facts about addresses, or perhaps where a
bank account is held, but not about financial transactions. It will be
used directly to confirm the customers identity and information
that they have provided, and to ensure that the person at the interview
is the person who applied. Once it has been established that the
application is genuine, any information that was obtained to confirm
identity will be destroyed. To make things clear, the
applicants name, address and date of birth will be retained, as
will the application form, so anything on the form will continue to be
held by the Identity and Passport Service. I hope that that satisfies
any concerns.
In the
extremely unlikely event that any of the organisations covered by the
order refused to provide the information requestedas I said, we
have had conversations with them and they are happy with the
ordersection 38 would allow legal action to be taken against
them in the courts to enforce the requirement. However, we do not
envisage that happening in any
circumstances.
I
mentioned that we are rolling out passport interviews for all new adult
applicants. We have been piloting them since May 2007. We started in
Belfast and Glasgow, and this month we are extending them to Newport
and Peterborough. I shall be happy to provide Committee members with a
map showing their nearest passport office. The full roll-out is planned
to take place from August.
There will be 69 such offices up
and down the country, generally within an hour of everybody. In the
past, we trusted that people were who they said they were when they
applied for a passport, and we did not interview them face to face. We
were one of the only countries in Europe to have that approach. I
should stress that, as I said, the order does not provide carte blanche
for the General Register Office or a credit reference agency to share
any personal informationnor would it be within their scope to
provide any information about bank
accounts.
In summary,
the order creates transparency for the passport customer about the
sources of information against which their application will be checked.
The credit reference agency sourceindeed, both
sourcesare open and checkable by the individual concerned.
There should be no surprises for a genuine passport applicant.
Importantly, the order will ensure that the provision of information to
assist with background checks is entirely lawful. It will put that on
that important statutory
footing.
I trust that
I have clarified the purposes of the order. I am happy to take
questions from and give feedback to Committee members, to whom I
commend the
order.
2.42
pm
Damian
Green (Ashford) (Con): It is always a pleasure to serve
under your chairmanship, Miss Begg, and it is a tribute to the
attractions of your chairmanship that several Members have been seeking
to join this Committee, even though they are not members of it. In my
experience, it is unusualindeed, uniquefor people to
volunteer to be on Committees of this
sort.
I
thank the Minister for explaining so clearly the thinking behind the
order. One of the slightly tangential points that she made was about
the 69 interview centres. I should love her to assert strongly that
each is within an hour of everyone who relies on public transport, but
I suspect that she could not do so and that that will be part of the
problem that will emerge. However, that issue is not central to what is
before us today, which is the first sign of the expansion of
intrusiveness caused by the identity card
legislation.
This
is not the place to have an in-principle debate about why the
Government are wrong to persist in that expensive folly, but the order
reveals the first signs of the potential consequences in practical
terms. The order is about the absorption into the states
information net of private details given by private citizens to private
companies. Such details are now to be arrogated to a Department of the
state. Clearly, one consequence will be that people will lose even more
confidence in the privacy of their private commercial transactions, so
the order may have damaging effects at the margin.
The order
illustrates what has been illustrated most notably by the leak of Home
Office documents about the use of congestion charge cameras. Those
documents have rightly inspired Shami Chakrabarti to call for a proper
debate about the appropriate balance between security and privacy. The
incident, which has been in the media in the past 24 hours, is a more
dramatic illustration of the difficulty of striking the appropriate
balance. The order is another, more low-key example of the Government
proceeding inexorably in the direction
of increased intrusiveness, whereby at every point
they plead security considerations, but carry on apparently regardless.
The order is another, small example of why it would be timely to have
that debate.
The
order will mean relying on a particular private sector provider, and
presumably others in future, for complete accuracy. Important issues
will be decided by the accuracy of the information. I can do no better
than repeat a question from a Lords debate on the underlying
legislation, when my noble Friend Baroness Anelay asked:
Can the Minister assure
the Committee that information held on those databases is 100 per cent
correct 100 per cent of the time? If it is not, why should that
information be used to verify information on the national identity
register?[Official Report, House of Lords, 14
December 2005; Vol. 676, c.
1274.]
I am
not saying that public sector records are necessarily any more accurate
than private sector records, but there is a substantive difference:
this House can at least hold Ministers to accountto some
extentfor things that go wrong in their Department. It is
obviously much more difficult to do so if the original error, which may
lead to an injustice, is made by a private sector operator who happens
to have a contract with the Home Office.
There are
also some detailed questions. The order covers a specific credit rating
agency, so what happens if the IPS signs a contract with a new credit
rating agency? Is that situation covered by the order, or will the
House have another chance to debate it? Will Parliament receive regular
reports about the reliability of the information? If ones
suspicions are right, and it may be that the information is not
completely reliable, it will be useful for the House to receive such
reports over time.
In
summary, the order throws an interesting light into the shadows of the
legislation, showing that it will lead inexorably to increased
intrusiveness.
Dr.
Brian Iddon (Bolton, South-East) (Lab): I must declare an
interest. I am the patron of the Society of Registration Officers of
England and Wales. Is the hon. Gentleman aware that The Day of
the Jackal is not just fiction any more, and that a
considerable number of people are distressed by having the identities
of their deceased relativesusually young peoplestolen
by people who want to commit criminal acts?
Damian
Green:
I am certainly aware of identity fraud, which is
clearly a big issue. That is why I have just been callingI am
sure that the hon. Gentleman has been following my argument
closelyfor a proper debate. There is a balance to be struck. We
are all aware of that. However, my point is that the Government never
seem to strike the balance; they always seem to come down on one side
of the argument. In the orders small way, it pushes us further
in that direction, and we should pause before we move inexorably and
continuously in one direction. This is an important debate about how
one maintains the proper freedoms of a society with all the problems
thrown up by the interaction of serious global crime, terrorism and the
new technology that enables bad as well as good things to happen. This
is one of our most serious debates, and although the measure seems on
the surface to be a small order concerning one part of the primary
legislation, it compels us to have that
debate.
2.49
pm
Paul
Rowen (Rochdale) (LD): Miss Begg, it is always a pleasure
to serve under your chairmanship.
The hon. Member for Ashford has
pointed out some of the broader issues, of which the order is, as he
said, just a small part. I make it clear at the outset that my party
believes strongly that we must do everything to make our borders
secure. We do not want to see passports being issued and then used for
fraudulent purposes in any way. Although I understand that the hon.
Gentleman wanted a wider debate, I would prefer to concentrate on what
the statutory instrument attempts to do and why it cannot achieve
that.
I have read the
SIs explanatory note and listened to the Ministers
reassurances about the use of the information. I have a problem with
the manner in which a section of the SI is laid out. The SI contains a
requirement, to which the Minister referred when she talked about what
would happen if a credit reference agency refused to provide
information. However, the explanatory note states that there is a
requirement for the credit reference agency to produce
information concerning the
identity of individuals.
That provision is not subject to the
constraints to which the Minister and the background information
referred. There is no requirement in the SI, and therefore no
guarantee, that the information should be destroyed and that the
Identity and Passport Service will confine itself to the limited
information to which the Minister has referred.
The hon. Member for Ashford
referred to the issue that was in the news recently: the use of one
type of information for another purpose without the people concerned
necessarily being aware of that purpose. My concern regarding the SI is
not about what it seeks to achieve. I would have absolutely no problem
if what the Minister has said were achieved to the letter and that
information were provided; I want to see Government officials given the
power to stamp out the issue of fraudulent passports. However, the
problem is that the SI contains nothing that will guarantee in law what
the background information says will happen.
We are all concerned about the
ever-encroaching use of information by not only the state, but various
other bodies. As the hon. Member for Ashford said, a much wider debate
is needed on that issue. The Governments argument is not helped
by the fact that the SI is so sloppily worded and all-encompassing that
it will allow the wider use of additional information that can be
obtained. I would have preferred the SI to be drafted in such a way
that it delivered what the Minister said it would deliver.
In other words, a provision
saying that only certain amounts of information will be collected and
used, and that it will then be destroyed should be on the face of the
SI. It is not at the moment. My party and I have a problem with that,
not with what the Government are attempting to do. Drafting such sloppy
legislation does not help the argument that the state must have access
to certain information that various people might object to being
used.
I hope that the
Minister will understand why I am making that point. I hope that, with
regard to future statutory instruments, what is said in the explanatory
notes will be written in the SI so that it has the power
of law. As it stands, there is no constraint to stop a future Minister
or Government completely ignoring that insurance, collecting further
information, and using it for whatever purpose they
desire.
2.55
pm
Meg
Hillier:
It is worth commenting on the remarks of my hon.
Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East about those who try to steal
the identities of young people who have died. As he said, the Identity
and Passport Service has detected and prevented frauds of exactly that
type, and it is important to extend those checks in order to tackle
that real problem.
I
shall take the comments of the hon. Member for Ashford in order. He
touched on passport interviews. In rolling out the passport
officesI can provide hon. Members with a colourful map to show
where they are; I am not sure whether there is one in Ashford, but I am
sure that there is one close bywe have tried to
strike a balance between the cost of setting up the office
network and the fees to be charged for passports. More than half of the
population will be within 15 minutes travelling time, and 95
per cent. of the population will be within one hour of a passport
office.
The hon.
Gentleman raised some questions about credit reference agencies, but
they are widely used. He suggested that people could lose confidence in
their private transactions, but anyone who gets a mobile phone or makes
a credit purchase is checked against a reference agency. People are
also able to check their personal data with such agencies. The system
is transparent and open. I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman would
rather that the Home Office had its own set-up instead of contracting
that out to another
organisation.
I have
just been advised that the nearest passport offices to the constituency
of the hon. Member for Ashford are in Maidstone and Dover. He can work
out while I am speaking whether they are within an hours
travelling time of 95 per cent. of his
constituents.
I
return to the point regarding the balance between security and personal
liberty. The Government are, of course, always happy to engage in that
debate. Security has to be a very high priority. If one asks the man or
woman on the street, or on the Ashford or Hackney omnibus, they want to
know that they are secure and
safe. Passports are valuable documents. It is worth stressing also that
the information from credit reference agenciesand, indeed, from
any other sourceis only one way to verify an identity. That
information alone does not prove an identity. If a question were asked
at a passport interview to which someone could not give the right
answer, it would not necessarily mean that they would not get a
passport. However, it might indicate another problem that would require
further
investigation.
The
hon. Gentleman asked whether any new credit rating agency would be
covered. I stress that only one credit agency has a contract with the
Home Office at any one time. Currently that is Equifax. Should the
company change when the contract is renewed next year, the arrangement
would be with that one company under the new
contract.
The hon.
Gentleman asked whether we can be sure that the information provided is
100 per cent. correct, 100 per cent. of the time. It would be very bold
of me, or of any hon. Member or Minister, to stand here and say,
Yes. The whole point is to ensure that the information
that we have is as accurate as it can be. A credit reference agency is
one well-rehearsed source for getting that sort of
information.
I welcome
the support of the hon. Member for Rochdale for secure passports. I
welcome and look forward to his partys support if we have to
vote on the matter on the Floor of the House. He raised the issue of
the credit reference agency again, but I stress that only the one with
the contract will be used. I hope that I have made that
clear.
The
hon. Gentleman also raised concerns about the exact wording of the
statutory instrument. As I said in my opening remarks, the information
gathered is covered by the Data Protection Act; it cannot be kept
because it would contravene the Act. I hope that he is confident that
we have that protection, and that the statutory instrument reflects the
existing law of the
land.
I thank hon.
Members for their comments, and I commend the order to the
Committee.
Question
put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That
the Committee has considered the draft Verification of Information in
Passport Applications Etc. (Specified Persons) Order
2007.
Committee
rose at one minute to Three
oclock.