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Session 2006 - 07 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates UK Borders Bill |
UK Borders Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Emily
Commander, Committee
Clerk
attended the
Committee
WitnessesRoss
Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering, University of
Cambridge
Guy
Herbert, General Secretary,
NO2ID
Phil
Booth, National Co-ordinator,
NO2ID
Gareth
Crossman, Policy Officer, Liberty
Public Bill CommitteeThursday 1 March 2007(Afternoon)[Mr. David Amess in the Chair]UK Borders Bill1.30
pm
The
Chairman:
I have to inform the Committee that
unfortunately Shami Chakrabarti is unwell and is unable to be with us
for our second evidence session this afternoon. The Public Bill Office
has done a brilliant job and managed to get two people in her
place.
May I remind
Members and witnesses that this afternoons oral evidence
sessions must stay within the scope of the UK Borders Bill, however
tempting it may be to stray into other areas, and please could everyone
try to keep questions and answers concise and in
order?
I also remind
Members that normal rules of order apply, even when we are sitting in
this unusual formation, so Members should not under any circumstances
use mobile phones, laptops or PDAs at any point whatsoever during our
proceedings.
Also, the
Hansard writers have found it difficultto report our
proceedings because some private conversations have been audible.
Apparently they interfere with the microphones, and that hampers the
Official
Report.
Our first
evidence session must finish at 3 oclock.I would have
to interrupt proceedings if they have not been concluded by then, and
the same thing will happen at the end of the second evidence session,
which must finish by 5
oclock.
Would
our witnesses kindly introduces themselves, without making an opening
statement?
Phil
Booth:
Good afternoon. I am Phil Booth, the national
co-ordinator of the NO2ID
campaign.
Guy
Herbert:
My name is Guy Herbert. I am general
secretary of the NO2ID
campaign.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I am Ross Anderson, professor of
security engineering at Cambridge, andI also chair the
Foundation for Information Policy
Research.
Q
205
1
Damian
Green (Ashford) (Con): I would like to start with the part
of the Bill concerned with biometric registration, and in particular
address Professor Anderson, with his expertise in the area. We heard
from witnesses this morning and in written submissions that there is a
widespread misapprehension that biometrics are 100 per cent. foolproof
and a perfect solution to the problems of identity management. I would
like your comments on how fallible they
are.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
The word biometrics
covers several different things. The Bill refers principally to three
biometrics, which will be facilitated by it. The first is a facial
image that is a digital
representation of the kind of photograph that you
have in your passport already. It is not very accurate. Randomised
controlled trials show that you can easily pass off someone
elses photo if you are allowed to choose from, let us say, a
couple of dozen photographs of people of the same sex and race. You can
get one that is a good enough match that it will fool almost anybody on
inspection.
Secondly,
there are fingerprints, which are significantly better but definitely
not infallible. There have been cases of misidentification recently,
most notoriously the McKie case in Scotland. We do not know for sure
precisely what the error rates of fingerprint scanners are because to
measure them one must consider the equipment, algorithm and actual data
that are used. If you take at face value the claim of the Metropolitan
police that the error rate is one in a billion, fingerprints are fine
for matching a crime scene print against the dabs of 100 known local
active burglars, but they are less satisfactory if you are trying to
match thousands of crime scene prints per year against a library of
millions of prints held on file. That is how advances in information
technology have led to more and more
misidentifications.
Fingerprint
technology is almost certainly not good enough if you are matching one
population against another, say 90 million people a year arriving at
Heathrow versus 60 million people in the UK. You will get absolutely
swamped by false
matches.
The third
biometric that we are talking about here is iris codes. A declaration
of interest, I suppose, is that these were invented by my Cambridge
colleague, John Daugman. These give very much better resolution than
fingerprints. The error rate is very much lower and as far as we are
aware they are the only biometric whichis powerful enough to
be able to match a population against itself. If you are matching tens
of millions against tens of millions you have to go for iris
codes.
Q
206
Paul
Rowen (Rochdale) (LD): I should like to ask you about your
last comment, particularly as it applies to children. What are the
particular problems in measuring the biometrics of children? What can
be used that is accurate and
reliable?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I do not have deep expertise in this
specific field, but I understand from colleagues that iris codes are
stable throughout life, as they are formed in the womb in the second to
third month of pregnancy. Fingerprints are more difficult, because
children may not have as prominent fingerprints as adults. Even though
they may not change, they may have a higher error rate in measurement.
Fingerprint error rates also increase where people are manual workers,
where they are elderly and their fingerprints have been worn down, or
where fingers have been injured. I have a cut on one of my fingers with
which I managed to crash the fingerprint sensors initially put in at
the FBI in Washington. They have fixed that bug, but it is still the
case with most biometrics that some people are not measured as well as
the general population. That can affect
children.
Q
207
Mr.
Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab): I understood you to say
that the error rate in terms of fingerprints was one in a billion. You
went on to say
that in terms of matching hundreds of thousands per population, against
another population, the frequency of misidentification is much higher.
I am not entirely certain how those two things marry up. An error rate
of one in a billion, given that we have a world population of 6
billion, does not seem a bad rate of accuracy to me. Could you just
clarify
that?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I was assuming that we could use, for
the sake of argument, the Metropolitan polices claim that the
probability of a misidentification when you match on 16 points is 1 in
a billion. I do not believe that it is that good. It is perhaps in the
tens of millions, but that is something on which research is ongoing.
The problem that you get in translating a figure like this to
population against population matches is that if you match 50 million
people in England against 100 million people arriving at Heathrow in
four or five years time, the number of identifications that you
are doing, assuming thatyou are scanning one finger of each
person, will be50 million x 100 million. So it will be 5 x
1015, if my mental arithmetic serves, which is an awful lot
more than the one in a billion error rate that even the Met would have
us believe. If the error rate, given the equipment that we are going to
use, is actually closer to one in 10 million, the number of false
matches that you will have will simply swamp the system. That is why,
for population-screening scale biometrics, iris codes are much better
than
fingerprints.
Q
208
Mr.
Wright:
The suite of biometric information, where you
marry up fingerprints with iris recognition, would provide a very good
and secure way of identifying a person, would it
not?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
If you were matching fingerprints and
irises, that should be a very strong means indeed, but then the
question arises of why you bother with the fingerprints since the
irises would give you most of the significance in that. Irises are more
than five times better than fingerprints. They are many thousands of
times better than fingerprints.
Q
209
Mr.
Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con): Profession Anderson,
may I ask you a general question and then a specific one? Liberty
argues in its submission to the Committee that
biometric registration is
effectively the first stage of roll out of the National Identity Card
Scheme.
You are an
expert in these matters; what is your view on that in
general?
On a
specific point, in the regulatory impact assessment the Government have
described the introduction of biometric identity documents as an
opportunity
to:
De-risk ID
Cards by trialling similar technology and
processes.
What is your
view on that
explanation?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I suppose that from the point of view
of the management of the programme it makes sense. A number of things
proposed in the ID card scheme are open to technical criticism as well
as the political arguments with which I am sure you are all familiar.
It might make operational sense to test out the equipment and
procedures on a sub-group of the population, most of whom are extremely
unlikely to
raise principled objections because they are not in a position
realistically to refuse to be scanned. As far as the ID card scheme is
concerned, I registered my scepticism when I gave evidence before the
Home Affairs Committee in 2004 on the Identity Cards Act 2006. I took
the view that, among other things, you are not going to get an awful
lot for a large amount of money, that other problems should be tackled
as a matter of priority and that many of the arguments that were
advanced in favour of ID cards, namely the rhetoric around identity
theft, missed many important points of policy and
engineering.
Q
210
Mr.
Jackson:
So, at the risk of inviting youon to
tendentious ground, would you say that this is possibly an example of
function creep, moving from biometric data into laying the
infrastructure for a full national identity card
scheme?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I think the threat of that is fairly
clear. It has been clear in ministerial utterances, in the explanatory
notes to the Bill and in the excellent document produced by the House
of Commons Library. It is straightforward that this is a stepping-stone
towards an ID card scheme that Ministers envisage will at some future
time be compulsory and used by many other services: banks, insurers,
shops and so on to identify their customers. That brings us
tothe objections that I raised before the Home Affairs
Committee, and you can refer to the Committees record if you
want the details.
The
Chairman:
We certainly cannot stray into a general
discussion about ID cards. Did Mr. Herbert or Mr.
Booth want to comment on the same
point?
Guy
Herbert:
On the same point, it is explicitly part of
the plan. If you look at the identity management action plan published
by the Home Office at the end of the last parliamentary Session, you
will see that the scheme is intended to use the biometric database that
is being developed for immigration purposes as part of the national
identity register. It is therefore explicitly a stepping-stone in a
technological respect. It is also a stepping-stone in a legal respect.
The House was promised during the passage of the Identity Cards Bill
that there would be no compulsory element to the scheme and that that
would be left to future legislation. Many Members and many Members of
the public might have thought that that would be a new ID cards Bill to
make them compulsory. The legislation shows that it can be
salami-sliced. A section of the population is in effect being compelled
on to the ID cards register, on the same database, through this
legislation.
Phil
Booth:
During the passage of the Bill there was an
exchange between the then Home Secretary and the Joint Committee on
Human Rights that pointed out that to salami-slice the population in
such a waywas potentially discriminatory. NO2ID is not aware
that those concerns were sufficiently answered oranswered to
the satisfaction of the Joint Committee. Furthermore, we would say that
there is an administrative thing going on here in that there is an
ongoing process by which the costs of the development of the ID card
scheme are reported to Parliament on a six-monthly basis. We would be
interested to see whether certain costs are now being hived off into
other Departments in that way. If the biometric
portion of the register is being built for that
purpose, will it be tagged as an immigration cost rather than as an
identity scheme
cost?
Q
211
Chris
Mole (Ipswich) (Lab): You described to us, Professor
Anderson, how some of the biometrics could singly, if not in
combination, significantly increase confidence in a transaction between
an individual and the state at any point. Can you tell me how you think
a false negative would affect an individual in any such transaction? Do
you think it would be any worse than a reversion to the situation
before the use of biometricsthat is, if they had to produce the
paper documents that they currently have to
produce?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Let us suppose thatone of my
studentsmost of our graduate studentsare foreigners
these daystracked out to BurySt. Edmunds to have his
fingerprints scanned for his ID card, which is in effect what will
happen to my students if this becomes law, and that while he was there,
there was a false positive that mistakenly identified him as someone
who had acquired a criminal record in the UK or some other country in
the past 10 years. The likely outcome for such a person would be quite
a lot of hassle, to put it mildly. The Bill contains powers whereby the
immigration officer could detain my student for up to three
hours.
Students who
have been interrogated by immigration officers in the past have
commented on their brusqueness, lack of civility and unwillingness to
give names, and a general culture that is rather different from that
which we expect nowadays from the police. My student might expect to be
given the once-over and perhaps held overnight in the cells while
further inquiries are made. In the fullness of time, once you start
getting a large number of false negatives through the system, the
system will learn not to react so aggressively. But in the beginning,
at least, I can foresee that a number of individuals might have quite a
hard time of
it.
Q
212
Chris
Mole:
But would you accept that there are big differences
between the circumstances in which there can be false positives and
false negatives? They exist in different transactional
contexts.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
You can of course tweak a system so
that you can adjust the number of false positives versus false
negatives. That opens the question of who will do the tweaking and what
the institutional incentives will be. Another raft of issues comes
along when you start thinking about using a national identity document
in financial transactions. Banks tend to have a very different idea of
what the trade-off between false positives and false negatives should
be.
One reason why
the banks have not introduced biometrics for, let us say, card payments
is that they are very reluctant to insult their customers. They reckon
that a fraud rate of 1 in 100 is acceptable provided that the insult
rate is no more than 1 in 100,000. I rather think that police,
immigration, the Home Office and so on might take a completely
different view of false negatives and false positives. I do not see any
evidence that such issues are being thought
about.
Q
213
Chris
Mole:
But that is the subject of the design of the overall
systemnot the technology, but the operational system in which
it sits. You are making assumptions about what form that will
take.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
What I see so far in Government
thinking is a move away from iris codes towards fingerprints. I can
understand the police lobbying in favour of compatibility with their
legacy systems, but it will make questions about false negative versus
false positive somewhat more acute than would be the case if the
Government had stuck with their original plan to do all this by means
of iris
codes.
Q
214
Damian
Green:
I want to move on to security issues, but just to
pick up on that, would it be more difficult to institute a full iris
recognition system from now? Would it take longer and would it be more
expensive?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I tend to the view that an iris
recognition system could be implemented in a more lightweight way,
almost out of the box. The reason for that is that they are working the
system in the United Arab Emirates, where their principal concern is to
stop people who have been deported, principally Pakistani prostitutes,
from re-entering the country under passports in different names, which
they get by bribing officials. Over the past few years, the United Arab
Emirates has scanned millions of people who have arrived in the country
and it has caught thousands of people trying to re-enter the country
illegally. A system like that can be stand-alone; you do not have to
spend years and billions of pounds integrating it with existing
technology. The possibility exists of carrying out that kind of entry
screening independently of any future fingerprint
strategy.
Q
215
Damian
Green:
More generally, I would like to ask each of you
about the issues of keeping the biometric information secure, however
it is collected. What are the problems with that? Is the information
likely to drift across different Departments, or out into the private
sector?
Professor Ross
Anderson:
There is a fundamental security engineering
problem with biometrics as opposed to, say, the cryptographic keys in
your chip and PIN card. Once your biometrics become compromised, you
cannot revoke them; it is not practical to do eye or finger
transplants. Therefore, once you start using biometrics on a very wide
scale, for all sorts of everyday transactions, the mafiafor
want of a better wordwill also have your biometrics. You do not
know which shops are owned by the mafia, but if you end up having to
put your fingerprint on the glass every time that you buy a can of
Coke, sooner or later the mafia will have the biometrics of millions of
people.
What can you
do about that problem technically?We have conducted a line of
research at Cambridge whereby, instead of storing a biometric on a
database, you use it to generate a cryptographic key, which the user
can then carry around in a smartcard. So the system, instead of taking
a Big Brother approach, becomes an enabling technology, whereby the
citizen or customer can use their own biometric as a key to unlock
their account with a particular institution.
Curiously enough, the student
who carried out that work is currently sitting in Beijing for three
months, waiting for his visa to be redone. However, yes, it is
technically possible to do very much better than is being proposed in
the
Bill.
Guy
Herbert:
From the point of view of the security of
the information, the system is being built broken here; you can see
that in the information-sharing provisions that seem to creep into
every Bill these days. In clause 8(2), there is provision for the
information that is collected for the purposes of the Bill to be used
for any designated purpose that the Secretary of State chooses to
establish, which is a very broad provision. All these data-sharing
provisions have precisely the same problem; the more purposes that you
use information for, the more it is spread around. The simple way to
keep information secure is to have a single system that is not used for
other purposes and is locked to that
purpose.
Q
216
Damian
Green:
Would that idea be directly useful to the
consideration of the Bill? Are you saying that the Bill should specify
uses, rather than have these catch-all
powers?
Guy
Herbert:
Always, in principle, we would
say that the use that information is put to should be very carefully
specified, preferably in primary legislation, to avoid feature creep.
However, it is more than that; you also need technical and
institutional solutions that prevent the broad spread of
information.
Q
217
Kitty
Ussher (Burnley) (Lab): I think that we know your views on
ID cards, generallyI would suggest that the clue is in the name
of your organisation. However, I wanted to put that to one side and
specifically ask you bothwhichever of you would like to
answerwhether you think that the proposals in the Bill will be
useful in terms of our immigration policy
specifically.
Guy
Herbert:
NO2ID does not have a view on immigration
policy. We could not have a view on immigration policy, because we are
an umbrella group that contains people who would like open borders,
people who would like all foreigners locked out for ever, and people
whose views are everywhere in between. Equally, we do not have any
views on the technical powers for immigration officers that will be
introduced in the Bill. What we are concerned about is the general
tenor of the Bill, particularly the onerous registration procedures,
which are connected, as we have illustrated, with a general desire for
a population register. Having a register of migrants, a register of
visitors, is intrinsically harmful to the public and to the welfare of
Britain, whether or not it is extended to a general population
register.
We believe
that a register will put people off coming here, and that means not
just Professor Andersons students, but potentially valuable
migrant workers, and foreign residents who bring a lot to this country
and spend a lot of money here. The policy is incoherent. The Government
appear to say, We welcome immigration and the expansion of our
borders and trade with the outside world, but at the same time we will
focus resources on inconveniencing the people whom we want
here. The measures will not affect the clandestine
immigrant.
Q
218
Kitty
Ussher:
I am slightly confused, because you said that you
had no views on immigration policy, but you have just spent the past
few minutes explaining that the Bill could deter immigration and that
that is bad. Could you clarify what your organisation thinks?
Guy
Herbert
:
I said that the policy
is incoherent in its own terms. The Government want to promote legal
immigration, but at the same time they plan to bear heavily on legal
immigration.
Q
219
Kitty
Ussher:
So, the view of NO2ID is that the legislation is
bad because it will discourage the people whom we want in this country
from coming?
Guy
Herbert:
It is bad in its own terms,
yes.
Professor Ross
Anderson:
The academic view is that the move to
require people to obtain biometric visas before they enter the UK,
which is part of the e-Borders programme, could cause us and the
computer industry, with which I have significant links, considerable
problems. The Committee might find it useful to consider, first, the
Emirates approach, which is lightweight and aimed at a specific
purpose, namely keeping out deported bad people for public
healthand order reasons; and secondly, the US-VISIT programme,
which is a medium-weight programme whereby one is photographed and
fingerprinted when one visits the USA, although most people do not have
to be fingerprinted prior to boarding an aeroplane. Thirdly, the Bill
is developing the UK system, which is more heavyweight than the US
system.
My concern as
an academic is that the US is already becoming a significantly less
attractive place to hold scientific meetings, because of the
difficulties and delays that non-Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development scientists have travelling there.
If we inflict that on scientists from the 100-odd visa countries in the
UK, we will also be shooting ourselves in the foot. There are similar
concerns in the IT industry, which relies very heavily on migrant
programmers, and I expect that there are similar concerns in the City,
too, although it is grown up and it can fight its own
battles.
Q
220
Kitty
Ussher:
So, it is the view of NO2ID that biometric ID
cards for immigration purposes only can be an effective immigration
tool as long as they are done with the minimum of red tape?
Professor Ross
Anderson:
Well, I am not from NO2ID, I am from the
Foundation for Information Policy Research.
Guy
Herbert:
Our view is that you can institute any form
of immigration control you like, but that you have to accept the
consequences. Making it a grand and expensive system that will weigh
heavily on legal immigrants means that you will discourage the very
people whom you say you want here. At the same time, you are building a
surveillance system that you do not need to
build.
Q
222
Kitty
Ussher:
Are there circumstances in which you could have a
biometric ID card, for immigration purposes only, which would be useful
to a country in conducting its immigration policy?
Guy
Herbert:
Conceivably, yes. There are technical
solutions that would make it work better than a centralised
database.
Q
223
Mr.
Jackson:
May I return to Mr. Herbert and
Mr. Booth and deal with issues touched on in previous
answers? As you know, clause 5 works through secondary legislation; it
is quite loose in that respect as the provisions are not to be found in
the Bill. In my opinion, the Minister has not given a satisfactory
answer on that, although it is a separate issue. For instance,
subsection (2)(k) would
permit the Secretary of State on
issuing a biometric immigration document to require the surrender of
other documents;
and
subsection (1)(b)(iii) would apply
in specified circumstances, where
a question arises about a persons status in relation to
nationality or immigration.
Do you feel that there is scope for
difficulties inhow the Bill is interpreted once we have
biometric immigration
data?
Guy
Herbert:
There is certainly scope for arbitrary
enforcement and arbitrary regulation. I think in principle that that is
not a good thing. However, the whole of the registration regulations
are very broadly drafted, and in some respects they parallel
preciselythe regulations on the Identity Cards Act 2006.
Presumably they are meant to slot together. That is perfectly
understandable in the
context.
Q
224
Mr.
Jackson:
With your indulgence, Mr. Amess, I
have a general question for Mr. Booth and Mr.
Herbert. Do you feel that in the publication of the regulations you
will be given sufficient opportunity to comment on the specific
details?
Guy
Herbert:
That is entirely in the hands of the
Secretary of State when he issues the regulations. If he gives
Parliament and the country three months to consider them, fine. If they
are turned out on a wet Wednesday at the end of December and not
considered by Parliament until the first day after the Christmas
holidays, then obviously not. It is entirely in the gift of the
regulating power.
Q
225
Mr.
Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab): I have a question for you
all, but particularly for Professor Anderson. As you understand it,
would it be fair to say that the disbenefits of a biometric ID system
are theoretical assumptions, or is there an evidential base from the US
or other European countries making wide use of biometric ID in a
variety of ways that underpins such
disbenefits?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Again, it comes down to the breadth of
the term biometric ID. If you are talking about a
biometric ID as simply being an electronic representation of what you
already have on a passport, that is not a huge change. If, on the other
hand, you start talking about people relying on fingerprints to
authenticate banking transactions, that brings you into an entirely
different sphere. Hundreds and hundreds of questions arise, as already
mentioned, about how the mafia get hold of peoples
fingerprints, about the design of readers, about issues of
liabilitywill a bank be able to win a dispute with a customer
unfairly by saying, Your Government-issue photo ID was used;
therefore you are liable? Hundreds of questions flow from that.
It depends on how those things are implemented and whether they are
taking up by commerce. I am rather afraid that they will tend to be
taken up by those branches of commerce that want to engage in some kind
of liability or risk dumping.
Q
226
Mr.
Reed:
I think that most people would share those risks.
Can I infer from your answer that there is not an evidential base and
that they are
assumptions?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
We have only seen the deployment of
biometric ID on a large scale in two or three schemes so far. The
US-VISIT programmes perhaps gives us the biggest evidence base. The
deployment of biometrics in the United Arab Emirates is good for the
science, because it gives us a large database to look at. As far as
US-VISIT is concerned, the recent report from the US General Accounting
Office indicates that an awful lot of money has been spent and not an
awful lot of benefit has been received. The Committee and Ministers
should consider that very carefully, because the UK gets an awful lot
more visitors than Americatens of millions rather than
millions, because of our role as a hub between America, Europe, the
Commonwealth and so onand because we are proposing a much more
heavyweight system. Insofar as there is evidence, I direct your
attention to the GAO report on the US-VISIT scheme.
Guy
Herbert:
Professor Anderson has stolen my
example but he has done it much better than I would have done. That
report does merit careful reading. It is worth making the point again
that when you talk about biometric schemes of identification, that is
as wide a term as books. It could mean anything. It is
a biometric scheme of identification when I have put my thumbprint on
my laptop and my laptop opens up, but it is only comparing one
thumbprint with one thumbprint model. It is not comparing millions with
millions. Equally, the purpose and the function of a biometric document
varies very widely. If you are worrying about the security of those
things it is not only the problems of false matches and false
mismatches that you have to worry about, but the question of fraud. The
Government have sought to address that in all their legislation
relating to biometrics. It has always been presented as a way of
dealing with fraud, particularly in the immigration context. We think
of immigration fraud as someone thinking they are entitled to enter
Britain when they are not.
All these schemes have slightly
different opennesses to fraud. A digitally signed document with
biometrics embedded on the card is one thing and maybe less susceptible
to fraudcertainly less susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks
than a large database. It is infinitely less susceptible than a large
database to central attack because there is no centre to attack. You
pays your money and you takes your choice. You can pay an awful lot of
money and get a very bad choice, as the Americans have done.
Phil
Booth:
I do not have a great deal to add to my
colleagues statement but some friends at Privacy International
have pointed us to some sources which we will be very happy to submit
in paper form to the Committee, including testimony given to the US
Chamber of Commerce in 2004 that considered that the US-VISIT scheme
would impede legitimate travel and trade and also a survey and analysis
by the Santangelo Group on behalf of the industry associations and
trade councils within the US that also predicted significant revenue
losses and indirect costs.
The scheme has been running for
some years and we will be happy to submit a series of articles that has
been tracking the progress of the scheme that includes such statements
as up to $30 billion having been lost to the US in some form since
2002. It is fair to say thatin this case each individual
implementation of a schemethe technology, the legislation and
everything elsewill have a different effect in each
country.
Q
227
Mr.
Reed:
For the purposes of the intentions of the Bill, do
you understand why biometric identification, notwithstanding the issues
within that term, is included in the
Bill?
Guy
Herbert:
Yes; it is very clear why it is included in
the Bill. One of the problems with the approach that the Government
appear to be taking is that it is highly centralised and the
information is designed to be used for lots of different purposes, all
of which are risky.
Q
228
Paul
Rowen:
I was interested in the comments, Professor, that
you made about the operation of the scheme in the US and also the
Emirates. I wonder whether you could elaborate a little on how the
Emirates scheme is operated and what practical difficulties you
envisage in operating a UK biometric visa document rather than just
using biometrics to secure our
borders.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
How the UAE scheme works is that when
you fly into Dubai you look into the camera and get your iris scanned.
If you are deported from Dubai you get put on the blacklist and if you
try again to enter Dubai they pick you up at the border and turn you
away. It really is that simple and straightforward. The US-VISIT
scheme, as anybody who has been to the US in the last four years will
know, involves a fingerprint scan, then a photograph which can be
compared with your passport and with photographs that you produce in
future, so that if you try to get in using a false passport there is
some possibility that you will be
detected.
A small
number of people have been caught thanks to the US-VISIT
schemea handful of people with outstanding warrants for their
arrest. Overall, however, our assessment of the scheme is that it has
not provided any major benefits. It has brought what one might call
security theatre, rather than actual security. It reassures people that
the Government are doing something. We all know, of course, that if you
are worried about terrorism, things such as ID cards and fingerprints
are not the way forward because terrorist organisations have a ready
supply of people not known to the authorities and prepared to volunteer
for missions. None the less, it reassures people.
As always, the question is
about costthe cost imposed on those unwilling to go to the USA,
as well as that which would fall on universities, IT industries, the
City and so on, if it became more difficult for, say, a Chinese
scientist to come to a conference in Cambridge than to one in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Inevitably, that will make us a little less
competitive. We have to fight with places such as the Massachusetts
Instituteof Technology and Stanford for the best research
students. Everything that gets in the way of that is bad news for
us.
Q
229
Paul
Rowen:
Have there been any assessments of the possible
delays or costs of the new system, and of how that might deter
people?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I am not aware of any assessments of
the costs of the UK Borders
Bill.
Guy
Herbert:
Nor are we. If the Home Office, the
Department of Trade and Industry or the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport have done anythe latters would be on
tourismwe would, of course, be very interested to see them, as
would the Committee, I
presume.
Q
230
Lord
Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Mr. Alan
Campbell):
Professor Anderson, I have two questions to
help me review the evidence that you have given this afternoon. First,
the United States and most EU states have either moved, or are moving
towards, biometric visas and ID cards. In your view, on balance, have
they got that wrong on the points that you have
raised?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I refer you to the evidence that I
gave to the Home Affairs Committee three years ago: if Britain decided
to have an ID card scheme, the least awful scheme, and the scheme that
we should be imitating, is the one in operation in Germany. Under that
scheme, a central database is avoided and population registers are kept
locally; details such as photographs are sent to the federal printing
works in Berlin from the local registration office; it is against the
law for an ID number to be used for any purposes so that if, for
example, your bank were to record your ID card number in its computer
database, it would be committing an offence; and ID card numbers are
not person, but document numbers and change every time the document is
reissued. That avoids the problems seen, for example, in the USA, where
the social security number is used as a universal identifier, which
leads to rampant problems for individuals. Although I am sceptical
about the value of ID cards in general, if we must have them there are
much better ways of going about it than those proposed in the UK
Borders Bill and, more generically, in the Identity Cards Act
2006.
Q
231
Mr.
Campbell:
I think that you have answered my second
question, but I shall ask it anyway, just to be absolutely clear. I
have not read your evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, but I shall
make a point of doing so. To be absolutely clear, is your scepticism of
those aspects in this Bill based on administrative or engineering
problems, or on the principle of ID cards
themselves?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
It is based on both. I suppose that I
first became sceptical about ID cards as a student working in Germany
in the 1970s when there was a terrorist scare involving Baader-Meinhof.
I was for ever being pulled over by the policetwo or three
times a daybecause I had long hair. Ausweis
bitte! they would say. It seemed to me that the ability to ask
someone for an ID card had deprived the German policemen of the power
of observation and judgment. They had a formal procedure that they
could go through, whereas a British policeman would haveto ask
a suspect some questions and roll out his suspicions.
From the engineering point of
view, a quarter of a century or so of experience in engineering secure
systems has told me that it is a bad idea to try to put all your eggs
in one basket by trying to use the same token for too many systems. I
am sure that we all have bundles of cardslibrary cards, store
cards, swimming pool cards, all sorts of thingssimply because
it is natural engineering practice and good business practice for
businesses to maintain their own customer lists and to have control of
them.
When I have
been involved in engineering projects in which people have tried to
aggregate identityby putting a prepayment electricity meter
functionalityon to a banking smartcard, for
examplethey have tended to run into trouble, because the
applications fight with each other, the complexity of the thing grows
out of control and you can find the business models at war with each
other. What happens, for example, if the bank wants to introduce a new
deposit account but the space that is needed for that is coveted by the
electricity company for a new night-time discount scheme? The
complexity becomes unmanageable. It is a good idea to keep your
identity and your authorisation systems separate, simple and robust
where at all
possible.
Q
232
Mr.
Campbell:
May I ask a supplementary question, which arose
from the anecdote of your experience in Germany? Is it not the case
that the cost of issuing biometric immigration documents and identity
cards will be received from fees? Although it may be preferable to have
police officers who would make a judgment, there is not a spare pot of
money available. It is not an either/or situation in which you could
spend the money either on ID cards or on more police officers. The
reality is that the ID cards proposed in the Bill will be paid for
through the fees of the people who use them.
Professor Ross
Anderson:
There are already significant complaints
from our foreign students about the huge escalation in visa fees in
recent years. Where the students have to pay them, that becomes a
disincentive for them to come and study with us. Where we have to pay,
because we are employing the student as a research associate, for
example, that cost comes out of the research grants that I administer.
When they run out, I have to go out to do some selling and get some
more money, so it becomes a direct business cost to
me.
Q
233
Damian
Green:
I want to try to be fair to the Home
Officeit is St. Davids day and I am Welsh and feeling
full of the joys of spring. You made the point powerfully that
over-centralisation is one of the many bad things about the system. The
Home Secretary says that there will not be a single database, but that
the information in general will be shared over three databases. Does
that make any difference, for good or ill, to the arguments about the
general efficacy of the
systems?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I suppose it depends on how it is
done. If we ended up with large numbers of Government databases that
had information about me that could be used to impersonate me and, for
example, a dozen, or even three, Government databases had my
fingerprints, which could be used downstairs in the bank to withdraw my
money, I would be rather concerned about
that.
Guy
Herbert:
It may introduce some security concerns, in
that information has to be exchangedand there are more points
of access. It introduces considerable development concerns, in that you
have to bash together multiple systems rather than one and you are not
necessarily starting from scratch. As far as the general principle is
concerned, it does not make any difference, but there are a lot more
practical
concerns.
Q
234
Damian
Green:
Given the history of the management of large
electronic databases by central Government, and by the Home Office in
particular, how much confidence is it sensible to have that the
database proposed in the UK Borders Bill will work well from day
one?
Guy
Herbert:
To be fair, it is not just the Home Office;
it is all Governments everywhere. To answer the question whether they
have all got it wrong, they are all following a fashion and are all
susceptible to the same faults.
Professor Ross
Anderson:
I might be able to offer a slightly deeper
answer than that. One of the things that we are now researching is the
percentage of large software projects that fail. We know that this is
due to socio-economic factors because 30 per cent. of large projects
fail now and 30 per cent. of large projects failed in 1970. That tells
us that it is not because of the technologywe build much bigger
and better disasters nowadaysbut has to do with things like
risk aversion.
A
question then arises: why is it that the public sector is more likely
to suffer such flaws? Recently, people have been looking at laying what
we know of the economics of dependability alongside what we know of the
economics of organisations, public choice theory and so on. We find
that there is a significant mismatch. The things that you do to be a
good project manager and those that you do to be a successful Minister
are quite different. There are many examples but one should suffice: a
project manager is for ever trying to close down all options, to get
the specification as tight as possible, right at the beginning and then
not let things change for a few years as the system is developed. A
Minister, on the other hand, if he is wise, is going to delay hard
decisions and keep options open for as long as possible because
Ministers are fundamentally in the business of resolving societal
conflicts rather than doing
stuff.
We are
beginning to understand that it is because of a mismatch in culture
between the operation of the Government and of business, that you can
always expect that with certain types of project there willbe
failures. Projects that have constantly shifting specifications are the
most likely to fail. That should be an alarm bell for the UK Borders
Bill, the ID card project and the e-Borders project because the stated
goals are shifting too much and too often for us to be confident that
robust systems will be built in time and on
budget.
Guy
Herbert:
And from a legislative point of view it is
an alarm bell when so much is left to delegated legislation because
that allows for more ready shifting of the boundaries of a
project.
Phil
Booth:
It should be noted, and probably has been
noted, that throughout the passage of the Identity Cards Bill, the
supposition of Parliament, the public and virtually everybody was that
there would be a single, large database. It was only on the last day of
Parliament before Christmas that the strategic action plan from the
Home Office presented the novel option of spreading peoples
personal data across three existing systems. Clearly, shifts occurring
that late in the process feed into what my colleagues have
said.
Q
235
Damian
Green:
Am I right in understanding, then, that the project
proposed in the Bill will be at the bottom end of the likelihood of a
successful project, given all the constraints that you
suggest?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I think that I would be rather
concerned about it. The most worrying projects in Government at the
moment are the NHS database, the ID card project and perhaps the
childrens databasesin that order. In so far as this is
part of the larger ID card project, I am seriously worried about
it.
Q
236
Mr.
Iain Wright:
Professor Anderson, I was interested in your
comments to Mr. Campbell about the anecdotal evidence
regarding being a student in Germany and the idea that we are not
giving the police the opportunity to observe and to make a judgment. Is
it not the case that a procedure processing systems in conjunction with
biometric passport information actually reduces the risk of corruption
because there is a process that the police officer, or immigration
officer in this case, has to go through? That actually reduces the risk
that certain racial groups will be targeted simply because they are a
member of that race. Conversely, is it not the case that the person
being questioned, because of the mass migrant movement, can provide
positive reassurance that they have a legitimate right to be here? In
both cases, it protects the immigration officer and the person being
questioned.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Far more procedure can sometimes be
helpful. I was not enormously impressed with the formal procedures that
I observed 30 years ago in Germany and I hope that any developed for
use here will be better. On the discrimination side, my wife is of
Indian origin, but born in Cape Town, so I have got many in-laws who
are Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Especially among young men from those
communities there is concern that they could end up in a
stop-and-search situation. A particular problem with the UK Borders
Bill is that once all foreigners carry ID cards there will be a
temptation for police officers and others to stop people and say,
Are you foreign? If somebody says, Well, I was
born in Southall, they might be tempted to say, Prove
it. Is this the thinof the wedge? Will this run the
risk of disturbing community relationships? We do not know. We do not
know the context, or what the regulations are goingto
be.
Q
237
Mr.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con): You said that a significant
proportion of your postgraduate students are foreign. How important are
they tothe economics of Cambridge university, or your
department, as far as you can tell
us?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Well, without them we
would go bust; it is as simple as that.
Q
238
Mr.
Blunt:
What is your opinion, then, of the extra burden
that will be placed on them, in fees for the identity cards they will
be required to have in addition to the visa arrangements they already
go through, as well as by the obligation to report? What is that likely
to do to your students and the reputation of the United Kingdom as a
place for higher
education?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
It will diminish our
competitive position. I am not going to be a Cassandra and say that it
will be the last straw that breaks the camels back, but every
week at this time of year we find that we are losing able students to
competitors. The prospective student I lost this week is going to
Stanford instead of Cambridge; it happens all the time and in each
individuals decision there are a number of factors. One of the
things that seriously concerns us is that in some places, particularly
in the far east, the UK is beginning to get the reputation of being
non-competitive. For example, Chinese students are starting to say
amongst themselves, Service in the UK isnt very good.
You can often get a better deal by going to the USA. There are
also worries about the perception in India, because students from China
and India are a significant part of our intake; foreigners are
three-quarters of our graduate student body. Every single little bit of
extra weight that is put on top of the beast makes it go slower and
less likely to win the
race.
Q
239
Kerry
McCarthy (Bristol, East) (Lab): There are a few areas I
want to cover. On the point about overseas students, I think you said
earlier in evidence that fees for students are higher in the United
States, which is certainly my perception. You gave as an example a
student who was deterred from studying at Cambridge and decided to go
to Stanford instead. Surely that is nothing to do with the situation we
are discussing at the moment. It is nothing to do with fees; it is a
decision about what sort of course students want to take.
Professor Ross
Anderson:
The particular student to
whom I refer decided to go for Stanford because it offered him a
scholarship and because he had applied too late in our cycle for us to
offer him one of the scholarships that we would have
applied.
Q
240
Kerry
McCarthy:
So that is nothing to do with your case that
increased fees here would deter
students.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
But the point is that all the time,
especially at this time of year, we are competing for the best research
students with our peersplaces such as Stanford, MIT, Carnegie
Mellon and so on. One of the factors is funding; it is still perhaps
the most
significant.
Q
241
Kerry
McCarthy:
In respect of the provisions in the Bill, I am
trying to nail down what evidence you have that they would be a
significant deterrent as opposed to all the other factors that might
make someone choose the United States rather than the
UK?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
We already have problems with the
tightened-up visa regime, as it has changed over the last year or two.
For example, the student who did the biometric work with me is
currently sitting in Beijing and has an assurance that he should get
his visa by March. In effect, he will have spent his writing-up
period in Beijing and will come back to us for his post-doc. That is a
more and more common occurrence. The problem is that as more and more
students get negative experiences, of whatever kind, whether it is
being questioned for an hour or so by unfriendly immigration officials,
having to wait three months for a visa, or having to pay hundreds of
pounds more for a visa than used to be the case, it feeds into the
general perceptionwhat students are talking about in the common
rooms in universities in China and India about the best places to do a
PhD. That is a matter of competitive concern to
us.
Q
242
Kerry
McCarthy:
Do you know what the figures are for the
increase in the number of overseas students who are choosing to come
and study in the UK, say over the last five or 10 years? I wonder
whether there has been a falling
off.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I could look into the figures, but I
do not have them off the top of my
head.
Phil
Booth:
We have a link to the Higher Education Policy
Institute report and various other internet links, which may begin to
illuminate the
figures.
Guy
Herbert:
The UK Government have a target for
increasing the number of students from abroad in British higher
education. That target has ceased to be met over the last couple of
years.
Guy
Herbert:
The trend was upwards, but is now falling
off.
Guy
Herbert:
Indeed, but all these things are a matter of
decisions at the margin. There is not one thing that necessarily makes
you choose not to come here, but if we increase the costin a
very general sense the cost of somebodys visiting the UK for
whatever reasonthere is a possibility that you choose something
else. The US went through the same thing when they introduced much
tougher visa restrictions. Our submission has an item from Bill Gates
speaking at Davos in 2005, saying that the United States was suffering
very badly from Asian students ceasing to come to take computer
courses, precisely because they had started to be put off by the visa
restrictions.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
In the case of Cambridge, for example,
our vice-chancellor spends a significant part of each year travelling
to the far east. We recently made one of our five pro-vice-chancellors
responsible for overseas activities, and her job is now basically to go
to places such as India and China to whip up business. That is how
seriously it is seen in Cambridge. I am a member of the council of the
university, the universitys governing body, so I get to see and
hear about such concerns at that
level.
Q
245
Kerry
McCarthy:
Moving on, you raised the point about the police
potentially harassing peopleand demanding identification and
so on. In my
constituency, there must be a significant number of
people who may or may not be legally entitled to be in this country,
but might be open to suspicion. Would it not be a lot easier, if
somebody wanted to check their identity, for them just to be able to
produce an ID card and say, Yes, this is it, I am entitled to
be herea two-second question and answer? That is it, it
is over, rather than relying on bits of paper from the Home Office and
all the other forms of identification one might have to produce at the
moment. Would it not make life easier for those people who need to
prove their
status?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I seem to recall that the Home Affairs
Committee recommended that the way forward would be more vigorously
conducted and resourced enforcement of existing regulations against
illegal working. I believe that the recommendations have been taken up.
I understand that the Home Office is introducing a helpline later this
year, which will enable employers to phone up and check whether someone
is legit. That is being
fixed.
Q
246
Kerry
McCarthy:
That already exists, in that there is an
employers hot line, which they can phone up and check, but it
is obviously more complicated for an employer, say, to make a phone
call than it is for somebody to get an ID card out of their wallet. You
are talking about another scenario. I was talking more about the police
rather than employers carrying out checks. If the police wanted to
check someones immigration status, at the moment we are talking
aboutas with people coming to my constituency surgerya
whole bundle full of paperwork, including letters from the IND, maybe
travel documents and various other things they have sent. It can be
very difficult wading through that to try to work things out, because,
obviously, letters have expiry dates and limited shelf lives, only
being effective the date that they are issued. I do not understand why
you are saying that this would be so much more
onerous.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I do not understand why it is a
particular concern at all. Certainly, when my wife was not yet a
British citizen, she had a stamp on her passport saying that she had
indefinite leave to remain or whatever it wasI do not remember
the detailsand that was sufficient. When she went and got jobs,
she would wave her passport, quote her national insurance number and
the job would be done. I do not see why one has to add on top of that
system, which worked fine, yet another card. No doubt, even once people
have these cards, there will still be letters from IND about status and
one thing and another. I cannot see how adding another card to the
existing travel documents solves the
problems.
Q
247
Kerry
McCarthy:
You say that the police would be more likely to
stop people and ask them to produce this identification. Why would they
be more likely to do that than they are to question peoples
immigration status
now?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Once it becomes the case that every
foreigner apart from short-term tourists has to carry an ID card,
presumably it will become procedure to ask for
it.
Q
248
Kerry
McCarthy:
Why would it, though? Certainly in my area, the
police are very wary of community cohesion issues. They want not to
stir up
conflict but to build good relations, so they are
quite reticent about making inquiries of people. The last thing that
they would want to do would be to walk through some of the areas in my
constituency and stop everybody who looks Somali in origin, demanding
to know what they are doing on the streets of Bristol. Why will they be
more like to do that when people have
cards?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I agree entirely that that is not how
the police should operate.
Q
249
Kerry
McCarthy:
But you were saying that this will make them
more likely to operate like that. Why would
it?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Because once it is there, it will be
asked for.
Phil
Booth:
If the card is presumed to be a
persons badge of right to stay or to walk the streets, the
supposition behind what you are asking Professor Anderson
is
Phil
Booth:
No; that is it. If it is not compulsory to
carry one, people will not have these things, but if it is compulsory
for a certain class of people to carry it and those people can be
distinguished only by how they look, there will be a
problem.
Q
251
Kerry
McCarthy:
But at the moment, if the police suspect that
somebody who is walking around is in this country illegally, they can
stop them and ask questions or require to see documents. They do not do
that as a matter of course, partly because of resources and partly
because of the danger that you mentioned that they could be harassing
people who are here perfectly legitimately. I do not see why the fact
that the cards would be in existence would make any difference.
Guy
Herbert:
I think the discussion is getting slightly
hung up on that point. What happens when a new system such as this is
introduced is that the cost of inspecting somebodys status is
shifted because it is easier and the balance of risk is shifted between
people whose status is checked. People run the risk that not having
their cards with them, or having false positives or false negatives on
their cards, are more serious matters than not having the correct
immigration documents on them happens to be now. That is simply because
it is less hassle to check under a new system. That is not a strong
point either wayunder the new system it is less hassle to check
but when one does check one is more likely to believe that the result
is certain. That impression of certainty in the new system is a risk
either way. It is a risk if one gets false negatives as well as if one
gets false
positives.
Q
252
Mr.
Jackson:
In the evidence that the Minister gave
previously, which I have been re-reading, he
said,
What we
have to construct is the right roll-out plan for biometric immigration
documents. We are starting with none of those 3.4 million people with
biometric immigration documents; we want to get to a situation where
they all have them.[Official Report, UK
Borders Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2007; c.
23.]
He also said,
There is a minor
technical question, which is that it is important to ensure that the
specification of the technology that we use is common across the
EU.[Official Report, UK Borders Public Bill
Committee, 27 February 2007; c. 22.]
Earlier,
Mr. Rowen and Mr. Campbell spoke about the
revenue costs, and Mr. Campbell made the point that the
scheme might be self-financing. Can I ask Professor Anderson,
Mr. Booth and Mr. Herbert whether there is any
reputable academic data on the likely capital cost of setting up the
infrastructure, bearing in mind that it is going to be spread across a
number of Government agencies. If not, what is your estimate of the
likely cost?
Professor Ross
Anderson:
I suppose I should refer you to the study
that the London School of Economics did in the context of the Identity
Cards Bill. I contributed some bits and pieces to one of the chapters,
but over all, as I recall, the document paints a picture of possible
costs of the order of £20 billion for a fully implemented ID
card scheme. What proportion of that would fall on a borders-only
scheme in the event that the UK Borders Bill was implemented and, let
us say as the result of a change of Government, the ID Cards Bill was
not, I would not like to hazard a guess. I do not know how much of that
you could carve
out.
Guy
Herbert:
It wholly depends on what you do. There are
cheaper ways of doing it and more expensive ways, and it is not a minor
technical question whether it is interoperable with other systems. At
which stage you decide to make it interoperable will affect how much it
costs, because it will affect what you do. So it is a matter of,
How long is a piece of string? I am afraid. It could be
very, very, very expensive, as the US-VISIT system has
been.
Guy
Herbert:
That is $330 million a year, apparently, to
do fewer people since it started than Heathrow is expected to handle in
year.
Q
254
Mrs.
Sharon Hodgson (Gateshead, East and Washington, West)
(Lab): Coming back to Professor Anderson, we were talking
about foreign students. Just to help the Committee judge the importance
of the evidence that you gave, could you tell me how much the fees are
for a postgraduate student at Cambridge and how much you imagine the
charge might be for a biometric ID
card?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
The fees for a foreign PhD student are
of the order of £10,000 a year if the student is coming from
outside the European economic area. The visa fees, which I think are
currently of the order of a couple of hundred pounds, are not
economically significant in comparison with that, but they are already
perceived to be an
irritant.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Well, in a number of cases students
manage to get scholarships for their fees. We have endowment funds in
the hundreds of millions, which pay fees and modest subsistence for
thousands of students. In the case of a student who is on a Gates
scholarship, for example, or a Cambridge Overseas Trust scholarship,
matters such as visa fees fall directly on their own
pocket.
Q
255
Mrs.
Hodgson:
How many foreign students does Cambridge
currently have, and how many of those have a
scholarship?
Professor Ross
Anderson:
I do not know off-hand, but I can get the
figures for you. Roughly three quarters of our PhD students, who do the
bulk of the graft work of research, are foreign. We rely on them to the
extent that if they all went away tomorrow we could not continue
trading on the same terms. We would have to start charging enormous
fees to undergraduates or educate many fewer home undergraduates, on
whom we make a substantial per capita
loss.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Three quarters of our graduate
students doing research degrees are
foreign.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
I do not have the figures off-hand. I
can get them for you if you want. In my own research team, I suppose
that scholarship students make up more than half and self-funded
students less than half. There is about a 50:50 split between European
and non-European
students.
Q
257
Mrs.
Hodgson:
Did you say before that you feel that a lot of
students are choosing the US now, rather than the
UK?
Professor
Ross Anderson:
Yes, our principal competitor,
certainly in computer science, is the USA. It is different in other
faculties.
Q
258
Mrs.
Hodgson:
I am sure that the US fees for equivalent
universities are more than £10,000, so the argument that it is
the visa fee that is encouraging them to go to the US instead of the UK
falls flat on its
face.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
No. What happens inthe USA is
that they charge economic fees to undergraduates and subsidise
postgraduates. That is one reason why American universities fill most
of the top few dozen places in any ranking. If you want to go to
somewhere like Stanford as an undergraduate, you might have to pay
£20,000 or £30,000 a year, but the profit that they make
out of you then subsidises people who are doing research. Harvard,
Yaleall the top shops are
similar.
Q
259
Mrs.
Hodgson:
I should like to challenge Guy, who said that the
number of foreign students is decreasing. We all think that the numbers
are increasing and I certainly know from one of my local universities,
Northumbria university, that their numbers are drastically increasing,
especially with students from Asia and particularly China. I think we
now have 4,000 Chinese students at Northumbria
university.
Guy
Herbert:
They are increasing but they are increasing
at nothing like the rate that the universities are expected to make the
increase, which is factored into their budgets. We have introduced a
paper from the Higher Education Policy Institute which discusses that
in detail.
To address
the point you made about the cost of visas, I am inclined to think that
cost is what people blame but it is hassle that makes them make the
decision. Unlike Ross Anderson, who glibly suggested that everybody in
this room had been to the USA since 9/11, I have not. I have not
because I will not put up with all the fuss at the airports, and
presumably this country has lost some export earnings as a result of
that.
Q
260
Mrs.
Hodgson:
As someone who has been to the USA within that
four-year time period, I think that the tiny bit of fuss at the airport
is well worth it in order to enjoy whatever you are going to the US to
do, and I would think conversely the same would be true of students
coming here. Whatever the small bit of extra hassle, if you want to go
to Cambridge to do your post-grad, you will put up with that bit of
hassle to get
here.
Guy
Herbert:
The point is that people make
decisions for different reasons and you choose your options on the
basis of a whole basket of decisions that you might possibly make. If
we put any particular barriers in the way of people, that will put some
people off. It will not put everybody off; it will put some people
off.
Q
261
Mr.
Iain Wright:
The cost of a foreign student doing a
postgraduate course at Cambridge university is £10,000. The cost
of a visa or biometric passport or whatever you like to call it is
£200. Why does Cambridge university not absorb that cost and pay
the visa? I would suggest that this is classed as an excuse not to have
biometric passports for foreign nationals. In the whole mix of things
this is a very minor point, as Mrs. Hodgson said, in the
context of coming to this country to
study.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
It is a minor point but it is a point
that some people might find a sticking point. Next time I ask someone
like Mike Lynch or Hermann Hauser for a donation to the lab to fund our
activities, what do I do if he turns round and says, You are
paying another of Gordon Browns stealth taxes out of
this?
Phil
Booth:
But there is a point about the impression that
people are getting. It is not, as my colleague Guy Herbert said,
necessarily the £200 or whatever the current charge is, but that
when someone comes to this country they are subjected to an
increasingly intrusive regime of fingerprinting and so on.
Ifthis is only anecdotalpeople before they come to this
country get the impression that Britain is turning into a Big Brother
society, they will only have those suspicions confirmed. By going
through the processit is not the feeswe are confirming
something that is detracting from our international reputation
stretching back over decades and even hundreds of years for being a
very free and open country. It is about reputation and how the
individual interprets the demands that are put on them that may be more
influential than a simple case of who pays the £200, whether it
is the institution or the
individual.
Q
262
Mr.
Iain Wright:
Are you seriously suggesting, Mr.
Booth, that potential students for this country, coming from, say,
China, will think, I will not go to the UK to study because I
think it will be a bit of a Big Brother country? I just cannot
see it.
Phil
Booth:
I am not suggesting a student; I am thinking
of an academic who did not attend a conference that I was expecting to
see him at. The reason he gave was that he had
heardincorrectlythat to come to Britain now he would
need to have his irises scanned and his fingerprints taken, and he
thought that was beyond the pale. So he did not come to a conference.
That is only anecdote, only my personal experience, but it indicates
the sorts of decision processes that people might be going through that
have nothing to do with the fees. The point was made that if it cost
£10,000 for the course fees, £200 for the visa is not the
problem. This is about the impression that people are getting and the
impression that is being given.
Q
263
Mr.
Iain Wright:
And I am suggesting that the cost is an
excuse; it is not about that. People come to this country from abroad
to study because they want the quality of the research and the
fantastic opportunities that this country provides. Having hassle for
half an hour to an hour, perhaps twice a year, will not stop a student
coming to study here for three
years.
Professor
Ross Anderson:
But, with respect, it will not be half
an hour or so. Certainly once and perhaps more often than that, our
students will have to take a taxi to Bury St. Edmunds to have their
fingerprints done. Why? Because there is not going to be an ID card
centre in Cambridge. Why does that happen? I do not know, but there is
no convenient public transport. You cannot get the train from Cambridge
to Bury St. Edmunds any more. Thousands of students who are already in
the country will be put to considerable expense and personal
inconvenience. They will spend a day and perhaps £100 on taxi
fares to go and get their fingerprints done. That will not make the
Government very popular among the student body. As people grumble in
the bar, students who have not made up their mind which party to vote
for may decide to vote for a party other than the one in power. There
are
costs.
The
Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed for giving evidence
this afternoon, gentlemen. Would you kindly retire to the back of the
Room and would our next witnesses come forward please? It looks as
though we have failed to get a replacement for one of our witnesses.
Would you kindly introduce
yourself?
Gareth
Crossman:
Certainly. My name is Gareth Crossman. I am
the director of policy at Liberty. I must apologise profusely on behalf
of Shami Chakrabarti, who was taken ill about an hour or so ago. She
says that she is extremely sorry. She was very much looking forward to
it. She also apologised to me for leaving me to face the Committee on
my own, which I
accepted.
The
Chairman:
On behalf of the Committee, would you wish her
well? We are very sorry that she was not able to be with us this
afternoon.
Q
264
Damian
Green:
I wonder if anyone will check whether Shami has
been dining with people from the Home Office
recently.
We have been
talking about biometrics and I want to move on to another part of the
Billthe detention at ports and the powers of immigration
officers. You put
in your very full written submission your concerns
about that. I should like you to expand on why you are particularly
concerned about that part of the
Bill.
Gareth
Crossman:
I would not say that it is a particularly
concerning part of the Bill in that it is something that should not
happen. This is part of a general trend towards the devolution of what
are essentially policing powers towards non-policing agencies, in this
case towards immigration officers. Over the last few years we have seen
a number of legislative changes that have resulted in non-policing
bodies being given, to a greater or lesser extent, policing powers. The
Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 contained provisions that
specifically set out the carrying out of arrest functions by
non-policing bodies.
I am saying that that is
something that should not happen, and there may be very good reasons
why it is appropriate for immigration officers to be able to exercise
the powers that are set out in the Bill. What I would say is that the
tradition that we have in this country of having an accountable,
properly trained police force is there for a very good reason. The
powers in the Billthe powers of detention and
pursuitcreate an offence if you do leave, but the
accountability structure seems to be rather lacking. I am not
sure,for example, whether or not there will be any
accountability to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, as I
believe has happened with asylum officials. As long as the proper
training and accountability are in place for these functions, I do not
see that there is a problem.
There is another point that I
would like to make in relation to that, but I do not know whether there
are any questions on what I have said so
far.
Gareth
Crossman:
Certainly. I would say that there is
something that is slightly concerning about the idea of immigration
officials, who obviously have a clear rolethey are there for
immigration purposesbeing given powers regarding
non-immigration issues over British citizens, which is what would
happen as a consequence of the Bill. If those powers are going to be
used against British citizensthere might be reason to do so,
for example if someone involved in trafficking is a British citizen, so
I am not saying that that in itself is wrongI believe
personally that the Bill should make it very clear that those powers
are only to be carried out for immigration purposes and not for general
purposes, for example if someone has been shoplifting from the
ferry.
the real problem
of illegal working lies not in the deceiving of honest employers but in
the intentional employment of those without immigration status by
unscrupulous and exploitative
employers.
If that is
the view of Liberty, would you not agree, therefore, that biometric
identity documents would help to tackle exploitative
employers?
Gareth
Crossman:
I think that I would put a slight rider on
that statement. I would say that I do not have evidence to prove this,
but I imagine it to be the case that, if there is a problem with
illegal working, the
problem is more to do with unscrupulous employers,
who know full well what the immigration status of their workers is and
exploit their position, than with unscrupulous employees who are taking
advantageof benign employers by using false identification
documents. I am not saying that that does not happen or that it could
not happen. Given that that could happen, the existence of a biometric
identification document would be of assistance, possibly in the way
that a passport or a similar document is, in that it is probably more
difficult to forge.
The point that I was making is
that I do notbelieve that that is the basis of the problem. If
this Government and the enforcement agencies wanted to locate large
numbers of people in this country who do not have the right to remain
or work in this country, I do not believe that it would be a
significant problem for them to do so. Take the case of Morecambe bay;
I would be surprised if the immigration officials were unaware that
there were problems with illegal work in that area.
I am saying all that by way of
illustration. If there are problems with illegal working and with
people not having the right to remain in the country, I imagine that
the problems lie more in the area of the ability to remove people,
although I appreciate that removals are
increasing.
Q
267
Mrs.
Hodgson:
Would you not agree that the fact that we do not
have any biometric ID, and that people can work here illegally, is a
pull factor? People can come here, and events like those in Morecambe
bay can happen. The legislation is trying to stop events like that
happening.
Gareth
Crossman:
I have no doubt that the legislation is
trying to do that. What I am saying is that, if you are an unscrupulous
employer, you will notcare whether someone has a biometric
identification document or not.
Q
268
Mrs.
Hodgson:
The fact that we do not have biometric ID
encourages people to come here, and biometric ID would turn that on its
head.
Gareth
Crossman:
I do not want to repeat what I have just
said. However, if there is a problem with illegal working, and the
problem is that there are employers who frankly do not care about the
immigration status of their employees, then a biometric identification
document will make no difference whatsoever in those cases. I accept
that it might make a difference in relation to scrupulous employers. I
do not have empirical evidence to back that up but I do not imagine
that it is a significant
problem.
Q
269
Mrs.
Hodgson:
But there would not be the numbers of people here
ready to be exploited if we had biometric immigration identity
cards.
Gareth
Crossman:
They are still within this country
unlawfully; I am sure there are many people in this country, so the
method of illegal entry
means
Q
270
Mrs.
Hodgson:
But this is not just about what is happening at
the moment; it is to change things for the future, is it not?
Gareth
Crossman:
I suppose that it is a slightly difficult
thing to predict, in so far as you would then have to say that as a
consequence of the biometric identification document, improvements in
removal and the manner in which people who do not have immigration
status are located, there are fewer people working illegally. It might
be one aspect of what I imagine are many ways of reducing illegal work
in this country. To say that it is the way in which this will be done
is
misleading.
Q
271
Mrs.
Hodgson:
Would you say that the legislation, the direction
of travel, what we are trying to achieve, is to reduce exploitation by
illegal
employers?
Gareth
Crossman:
I have no doubt that that is the intention
behind it.
Q
272
Mr.
Jackson:
Following Mrs. Hodgsons
questions, which are apposite to my question, do you think, in view of
what we have seen in the past few years since May 2004 and the abysmal
failure of the Government properly to estimate how many EU migrants
would enter this countrythey were hugely out; they said there
would be 13,000 and there are anything between 600,000 and
700,000that if you are tackling the issue of exploitative
employers, this is a red herring? Issues such as low wages, poor health
and safety, houses in multiple occupation and people trafficking are
irrelevant to the 600,000 people who have come in from within the EU
accession states, and indeed the EU10, from 1 January. The argument
that these documents will massively help the issue is completely
erroneous.
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes, I will say that that is erroneous. I
will not say it in a way that would make some sort of anti-European
point.
Gareth
Crossman:
Indeed. Although I made a comment about
cynicism in my briefing, I would generally say that this is being done
with an intention to address a number of problems, as is the national
identification card scheme. My response to it is generally that whether
or not that is the intention, this does not happen to be a particularly
effective way of doing so. I do not think that the introduction of a
biometric identification document will, of itself, have a significant
impact on levels of illegal working within the United
Kingdom.
Q
274
Mr.
Jackson:
In respect of those people from within the EU,
would you agree that if you add the cost of bringing in the system to
the cost of the pressures on local public services, the system will not
really tackle the most immediate issues at local level?
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes, I think that is probably right.
Q
275
Damian
Green:
May I move on to clause 16? It has been clear from
the evidence we have taken this week that it is one of the most
contentious and controversial clauses in the Bill, for a number of
reasons, mostly because it seems to add unnecessary and
all-encompassing powers to those that already exist. In its written
evidence, Liberty expressed strong reservations about clause 16. The
Government claim that it will help unaccompanied asylum-seeking
children. What do you say to that?
Gareth
Crossman:
When I originally wrote about this, I said
that I was not certain what the policy aim was behind clause 16. I
understand now that one of the main reasons for it is that it will make
it possible to keep tabs on people up until they reach an age at which
they can be removed.
Not being an asylum
organisation, we do nothave particular expertise in this
respect. However, I understand that rules are currently being
negotiated for the treatment of unaccompanied asylum seekers. That
being the case, although it might be appropriate to be able to keep
tabs on them, those negotiations should be finalised before that part
of the Bill comes into operation. Furthermore, I have reservations
about the drafting in the legislation. I had a brief call before coming
here in which somebody asked me about that. I took it on the go and
said that I would say something about the negotiations. I apologise,
but more evidence might be appropriate at a later
time.
Q
276
Damian
Green:
On the general points relating to clause 16, and
particularly proposed new sub-paragraph (v) to section 3(1)(c) of the
Immigration Act 1971, do you think that the addition of a
condition about residence to the controls that can be put on
people have implications under article
8?
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes, I do. Again, it is very open-ended.
There is no statement on the extent of the conditions, on how far they
may go, or whether they could effectively amount to control orders.
There is nothing about that in the Bill. I appreciate that it could be
said that any legislation must be read in accordance with the
convention and so nothing too onerous could be placed on an individual.
However, there have been a number of occasions in which, such
protection having not been in a Billit was just
inherentconditions have been struck down by the courts because
theywere oppressive. When the decision is made
aboutthe appropriate conditions, I would like it to be a
requirement in the Bill that when the immigration officer makes a
decision, the conditions are reasonable in all circumstances. That
would mean that there would be a prompt to realise that while you might
be doing something for a particular reason, you simply cannot place
excessive restrictions on where somebody can
reside.
Gareth
Crossman:
Absolutely.
Q
278
Paul
Rowen:
On that clause, do you think that immigration
officers are the most appropriate people to whom an unaccompanied child
asylum seeker should be
reporting?
Gareth
Crossman:
I think not, actually. My concern is that
immigration officers have certain responsibilities and were they to
place restrictions on a person who then absconds, they might face
criticism and consequences for their job as a result of not having
placed appropriate restrictions. Somebody more removedpossibly
judicial involvementmight be more appropriate when deciding
what is reasonable. There might be a tendency on the part of an
immigration officer to err on the side of cautionwhen
determining what residence restrictions are
appropriate.
Q
279
Mr.
Blunt:
May I ask about deportation in clauses 28 to 35?
What difference do you think those clauses will make to the current
arrangements for deporting foreign
criminals?
Gareth
Crossman:
That is difficult to say. Since June or
July 2006 there has been a strong presumption in favour of deportation.
In practical terms, the number of cases in which there will now be
deportation that would not have occurred before might not be huge; but
I do not think it is appropriate for this legislation to remove
whatever residual discretion there was. It is important that there be
some form of residual discretion to take into account those cases in
which a person, who might have been in prison for a very short period,
is not a risk to the community, as well as retaining the residual
discretion that would cover somebody with family ties that might result
in their not being deported under article 8. That is why I would say
that even though the number of people who mightbe deported is
not huge, because of the strong presumption that we have now, the
principle is important.
Q
280
Mr.
Blunt:
So for you the requirement for residual discretion
to deal with one case is a point of principle, whatever the benefits of
having a system that is much clearer and has fewer appeals and fewer
mechanisms for people to escape through and abuse.
Gareth
Crossman:
I do not think I said that residual
discretion would be kept for one case. I gave an example of the type of
case in which it might be applied.
Q
281
Mr.
Blunt:
What I was trying to get to was whether you were
stating a point of principle from which Liberty would not depart or
whether, in trying to administer an immigration and deportation system
in the widest national interest, there is a point at whichit
is legitimate to have a trade-off about bad cases making it easier, or
possible, to administer a system that does not end up with the terrible
backlog that we have now because the system is so difficult to
administer.
Gareth
Crossman:
I was talking about principle, but let me
expand on that slightly. I think that a message is being sent out. As a
nation, whatever administrative process we use, we work on the
principle that each case is decided separately, on its merits; even if
there is a presumption one way or another, you as an individual will
have your case decided on the facts. If we move towards a system of
automatic removal we will have moved away from that. We will be sending
out a message that the individual facts are not particularly relevant;
your case will not be decided on its merits or otherwiseyou are
subject to automatic deportation, therefore automatic deportation you
will have. I imagine that immigration is a difficult field to work in;
everybody who does so faces difficult decisions daily. When we pass
legislation that moves us away from the idea that cases are decided on
their merits, we send out an unfortunate legislative message to those
who work in the field.
Q
282
Mr.
Blunt:
So do you think that the Minister has been
incorrect in signing off this Bill as being consistent with the Human
Rights Act 1998?
Gareth
Crossman:
One of the grounds for saying that would be
that it can be certified that one can be removed, on the basis that to
do so would be in breach of ones convention rights. I would not
go so far as to say that that aspect of it would raise issues under the
convention. However, while it is perfectly permissible under article 5
to hold people, the presumption that people who are going to be removed
will be held until such time as they are removed might raise issues
under article 5.
Q
283
Mr.
Blunt:
Do you think that the triggers proposed by the
Government for deporting a foreign criminal are
appropriate?
Gareth
Crossman:
As I understand it, the position now is
that pretty much anyone who has served a period of imprisonment will be
deported, but I shall leave that aside. The idea that somebody will be
removed if they have served a custodial sentence for an offence that is
listed in the order, which ranges from messing with nuclear weapons to
shoplifting, means that people will inevitably be deported who have
served very short custodial sentences in circumstances in which that
was the only option, but who would not be suitable for deportation. Of
course, they might well be deported now
anyway.
Q
284
Mr.
James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): Why do you think that
the judges have lost confidence in the deportation system?
Gareth
Crossman:
That presumes that I think that the judges
have lost confidence in the deportation
system.
Q
285
Mr.
Clappison:
A constant stream of judges have expressed
criticism of the Home Office, such as Judge Hoffman at York Crown
court. More recently, various experienced judges have said that they
have no confidence that anything will happen.
Gareth
Crossman:
When you say anything will
happen, what do you
mean?
Q
286
Mr.
Clappison:
They make recommendations for deportation but
say that they have no confidence in them.
Gareth
Crossman:
If there is a concern over confidence in
the system, a lot of it can be placed at the door of the mistakes that
have been made. There have been errors, when people who clearly could
and should have been deported have not been, whether because
information was not passed from one body to another or because there
was misadministration. If you are a judge who is making recommendations
for deportation and you find that a serious criminal, who presents a
major risk to the public, has not been deported after their release,
that would certainly dent your confidence in the
system.
Q
287
Mr.
Jackson:
Let me take you to the Dog and Duck in
Peterborough. We are propped up at the bar, and my constituents, who
are the salt of the earth from north Cambridgeshire, say: This
foreign prisoner debacle is all about the Human Rights Act,
isnt it? Its abused, because if you are sent to prison,
period, it is not for not paying your TV licence, it is because you
have been very naughty. These lawyers are misusing the system and
abusing the Human Rights Act in a way that was not intended. It is
unfair. What would be your response to that sort of
comment?
Gareth
Crossman:
Having been brought up in Cambridgeshire, I
would look at them as fellow Cambridgeshirians. I would say to them
that it is extremely unfortunate that there has been so much
misinformation about the Human Rights Act, which has led to people
saying that human rights have become the new health and safety, that
You cant do that because its human
rights. It has not been helped by a succession of stories of
people being released on parole on an early date when clearly they
should not have been. There are other situations in which people have
raised human rights; it has gone so far as people sitting on rooftops
eating Kentucky fried chicken and police officers not going up because
of their human rights. That is nonsensical.
A few weeks ago, we saw the
idea that human rights prevented the pictures of people who were on the
run and dangerous being made available to the public in order that
these dangerous criminals could be apprehended. It is nonsensical, but
unfortunately it has permeated peoples conception of what human
rights constitute. That is an unfortunate starting point.
I have no doubt that there are
people who would otherwise be deported because they have served a
period of imprisonment, but who cannot be removed from this country
because to do so would be likely to result in them being tortured or
killed. That is a bar that is placed upon deportation. I think people
would be a lot more understanding of that sort of bar if we moved away
from the idea that human rights were helping people to eat their
Kentucky fried chicken in peace. The idea of human rights has now been
so badly affected by all the rubbish, frankly, that, when we try and
rely on human rights, people go from the starting point, Oh,
its that human rights stuff again, isnt
it?
Q
288
Mr.
Jackson:
So is the corollary of whatyou are
sayinggiven that we are not talkingabout automatic
deportation, but a presumption of automatic deportation, which is a
completely separate thingthat the Minister and the Government
will have to tighten up that wording in order to ameliorate the
misinformation, as you put it, about the HumanRights
Act?
Gareth
Crossman:
The wording of
what?
Q
289
Mr.
Jackson:
The wording of the Bill,clause 28
specifically, about automatic deportation and the presumption of
deportation. What is your view on
that?
Gareth
Crossman:
To be clear, we are talking about the
automatic deportation in all the cases and the presumption of
deportation in those cases that fall into the exemptions. Is that what
we are
saying?
Gareth
Crossman:
I was slightly uncertain myself when I was
reading this. For example, an article 3 bar on removing someone is
because it is not safe to do so. I am not quite sure how that sits with
an existing presumption that the person will be deported, if doing
so would be in breach of article 3. I have to admit that when I looked
at that, I was a bit unsure what exactly the purpose of this continuing
presumption might be. I have thought about this essentially in terms of
the Human Rights Act and the refugee convention; it might have more
applicability to some of the other exemptions in the Bill. Certainly,
yes, it struck me that I was not quite certain what that was getting
at.
Q
290
Damian
Green:
I want to move on to a point you make in your
submission about the ability to amend the regulations that will flow
from this, because Liberty points out that there is an awful lot left
offthe Bill and that some of what is left off is hugely
important. What areas would you like to see covered by such
amendments?
Gareth
Crossman:
Specifically, it would be in relation to
biometrics. What is created here? I said biometrics, but a lot is not
about biometrics, because the Bill is clear that it could be about
biometrics or about anything else that we might happen to want to make
it about, according to order. I do not think that it is too much of an
exaggeration to say that, for regulations about the biometric
identifiers in the Bill, any order could make information cover
whatever we want about whoever we want, within the scope of the Bill
obviously, and we can make that information available to anyone we want
and be forced to do with it pretty much whatever is
required.
Trying to
pin the tail on the donkey as to whether that is right or wrong is
impossible when you are talking about orders, because you do not know
the reasoning behind them. Over the last few years, there has been a
significant move away from the use of parliamentary orderwhich
is of course an absolutely essential and fundamental part of the
law-making processas the way in which we flesh out the bones;
the policy is decided and the order is the way we put it into effect.
We are moving towards a situation that we are now seeing consistently
in legislation, as in this Bill, where the serious policy-making
decision is left to order. I do not think that that is an appropriate
way to
legislate.
Okay, let
us say that an order is being passed and, if we are talking about
biometrics, it provides for 12 types of use that could be made of the
information. You, asa parliamentarian, are sitting there and
thinking, Well, 10 of these are fine and I do not have any
problem whatsoever with them, but I think that two are not
appropriate. Now, your power to do anything about that is to
let the order either stand or fall. You cannot really do anything about
it. If we are moving towards a world where the Government are removing
from parliamentarians the ability to make the proper policy decision
and to apply the proper level of scrutiny, which Parliament should be
entitled to give, parliamentarians ought to demand that, as part of the
order-making process, they should be able to say that those two uses
are not appropriate and, as a consequence, 10 are fine, but the two
will not do. I do not understand why that is such a terrible thing to
ask for. All that Parliament is saying is, Give us the level of
scrutiny. The level of detail which is in the legislation
nowadays, and the amount of it that we have to get through, is such
that we cannot fit it all on to the face of the Bill. If that is the
case, proper amendments
should be able to be made to orders so that proper parliamentary
scrutiny can be
applied.
Q
291
Damian
Green:
That is very interesting. I suspected that the
reason for this recent growth is that it removes the policy parts,
which now go into the order, from proper scrutiny in the House of
Lords. I think that that is the reason. However, it is also the case
that Ministers will recognise that passing bad legislation is worse
than suffering the embarrassment of minor amendments as the Bill goes
through in the first place. When they look back in the autumn of their
political careers at some of the legislation that they have put
through, former Ministers from all parties will acknowledge
that.
To return to
this Bill and the biometric sections that we have discussed, I know
that one of your other points that will be contentious is that the
application of these provisions might be divisive, affect community
cohesion and be used unfairly against minority groups. Would you expand
on
that?
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes; I think I was very careful and said
that it has the potential to happen, not that it will. My concern is
that if it is the caseand it seems to bethat it is an
accepted function for police and immigration officers to make random
checks to ascertain immigration status on people using public
transport, for example, issuing a biometric document might assist
that.
I notice a
couple of shaking heads. A couple of years ago in The Guardian,
Des Browne, the former immigration Minister said that it was a
perfectly legitimate use of the powers and resources of police and
immigration services to carry out spot checks on public transport. It
does happen. I am sure that the possession of a biometric immigration
document would be a helpful way of finding out whether someone is
entitled to remain in the country. The question is whether they should
be forced to carry it? If it becomes common usage, will we find that a
person who sounds a bit foreign, who does not sound like a European,
and does not happen to have their biometric immigration document on
them, will be considered a bit suspicious as a consequence? Would that
be grounds for further investigation of them? I believe that has the
potential to be racially
divisive.
Q
292
Damian
Green:
As I understand that it will not be compulsory to
carry it, will the corollary of that be that if a person looks like
someone who may well have one of these documents, they will be required
to report to a police station, which could be even more intrusive. I
can quite see that, were it to become an extra piece of available
information, that might well lead to changes in policing
habits.
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes, I absolutely agree. I think the
problem is that the intention of both Parliament and Government, at the
time legislation is passed, is removed from what happens when these
laws are put into effect. A good example of that is section 44 of the
Terrorism Act 2000. When passed, it was clearly intended to be used as
an extra tool to carry out stop and search, without suspicion, which is
normally the trigger requiring stop and search, the legislations says,
in terrorism-related circumstances.
That power has clearly been used
consistentlybecause most of the metropolitan area of London is
a designated zoneas a stop and search mechanism against young,
male Muslims, to the extent that both the Metropolitan Police
Authority, giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, and I
believe, Andy Hayman, a few weeks ago, have said that its use is
undermining community relations and becoming very divisive. I do not
believe for a second that it was the will of Parliament that that be
the use of section 44 and that that would be how section 44 worked out.
As a consequence, however, there is the potential, when there are
broad-ranging and ever increasing police powers, that the document
might become the one that people who do not look or sound European
might be expected to carry as a matter of course, and a failure to do
so might be considered
suspicious.
Gareth
Crossman:
I would not quite go that far, but the
point is
made.
Q
294
Damian
Green:
On clause 40, you make a similar point about the
very broad powers to enter a property in pursuit of a person or
documentation. Why are you worried about that? What is the
problemwith
it?
Gareth
Crossman:
Again, the drafting is extraordinarily
broad. What you are talking about is the creation of a power that will
allow a police officer or an immigration officeron the
authorisation of a senior officer, I grantto enter
someones home to locate an immigration document such as a
passport if they think that there is one there. Well, most people keep
their passports in their homes. The clause does not require that that
passport or passport application be anything to do with the offence for
which a person has been arrested. The potential is quite
broad.
I am not going
to say that there are not situations in which it might be appropriate
to enter someones property in order to locate a document if
they arenot an EEA resident, but you need something
inthe legislation to tie the exercise of that power to the
relevance of the document in the course of the investigation. That
could be either because it is relevant to the persons offending
behaviour or the allegation thereof, or because, as is required under
clause 41, the removal of the document is necessary for immigration
purposes.
The trigger
power to enter a property does not require finding the immigration
document to be relevant to removing it. You can remove the document if
you think it is necessary because it would facilitate the removal of
somebody without immigration status, but the power to enter the
property does not require any of that. It is sloppy drafting. If you
are doing this for a particular purpose, you need to ensure that you
limit it to that purpose, unless it is to allow people who are not
European citizens to have their homes entered every time they are
arrested, in which case it is a very good
law.
Q
295
Damian
Green:
You think that the clauses are amendable in a way
that you would think more
acceptable.
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes. The principal thing that I would try
to do would be to use the trigger for the removal of the document in
clause 41, and attach it to clause 40 as well so that there is some
causal link between taking the document and the entry of the property
in order to do so. It would at least provide such a causal link between
the need to take the document and the reason for which the person in
question is under
arrest.
Q
296
Kitty
Ussher:
I want to follow on from the interesting exchange
on people being required to carry documents and whether that would lead
to the arbitrary stopping of people in the road because they look funny
or whatever. My understanding is that there is no compulsion in the
Bill to carry documentsso it follows that, because it is not
mentioned, people will not have to carry them. We would
obviouslywelcome
that.
My concern is
why you believe that because the extra documenta biometric ID
cardwill exist, the police will be any more likely to stop
people arbitrarily. I do not quite understand that. Specifically, I
thought that such arbitrary behaviour on the part of the police was
actually illegal under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Could
you elaborate on
that?
Gareth
Crossman:
There is nothing in the Bill to force
compulsion, but what is to stop the Government from making an order
that forces someone to carry the document? This goes back to the point
I made about the power to amend orders. I would turn your question on
its head. Is there anything in the Bill that would prevent an order
being made that would require the carrying of this document at any
time. Do you think there
is?
The
Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality (Mr.
Liam Byrne):
On a point of order, Mr. Amess. I
understood that the Bill required regulations to be subject to
affirmative resolution in both Houses. Is that not the
case?
Q
297
Kitty
Ussher:
Is it your understanding that the regulations are
subject to affirmative
resolution?
Kitty
Ussher:
I have just asked the witness, Mr.
Chairman, if it is his understanding that they are subject to an
affirmative
resolution.
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes, I believe that that is the case, but
that being the case makes no difference in so far as anything can be
done about those orders other than voting for or against
them.
Damian
Green:
Further to that point of order, Mr.
Amess. That is exactly right, whether the regulations are subject to an
affirmative or negative resolution does not affect their ability to be
amended.
The
Chairman:
These are not points of order, of course. These
are matters for argument and matters for minuters and Opposition
spokesmen.
Q
298
Kitty
Ussher:
I would like to get to the bottom of this and I
will try to do so quickly, Mr. Chairman. It seems from these
non-points of order that perhaps a general point is emerging, which is
that were the Government to try to do what it is suggested they may do,
in other words introduce an order requiring compulsion, that would be
subject to the normal democratic process. We will certainly use the
later Committee stages of this Bill to ask the Government whether they
intend to do so. My understanding is that they do not, which will
perhaps alleviate your
concern.
Perhaps we
could answer the main point, which is whether it is illegal for the
police to arbitrarily stop
people.
Gareth
Crossman:
According to the Government it is not. I go
back to Des Brownes quote. He said that, as far as he was
concerned, it was a perfectly legitimate and proper use of powers to
stop people arbitrarily. When I say arbitrarily, there would have to be
a suspicion that a particular person might not have residential status.
I should perhaps be more cautious when I use the word
arbitrarilybut to stop people on the basis of suspicion of
their nationality. I think this is with regard to your report which
said that carriages on London underground trains and buses were being
entered and people were being checked to see whether or not there was
anything that might lead to a suspicion that they might not be a person
who had immigration status.
I would also say that there has
been a move in recent years towards more arbitrary policing powers.
This is very evident in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act
2005, which, for example, made all offences arrestable, and in the use
of the powers I have referred to under section 44 of the Police Act,
which require no suspicion whatsoever for stop and search. If these
powers are being over-used, is it that much of a stretch of the
imagination to say that, if you do not require any reasonable suspicion
to do a stop and search and you stop somebody, you might want to
inquire about the immigration status? If you are operating under
section 44, which says you do not need any reasonable
suspicion
Q
299
Kitty
Ussher:
I am quite worried by what you say. If the police
are arbitrarily using their powers, that is a serious concern and
perhaps we can come back to it in a different
form.
Gareth
Crossman:
What I would be very careful to say is that
I do not believe there is a tendency in the police to misuse their
powers as a matter of course. What I would say is that there is a
tendency in this Government to draft laws and publish laws of such
broad scope that the grey area where the police are not exactly certain
about where their powers begin and end has grown to such an extent that
it is far more common for people to be stopped and searched and for
powers to be used.
This is something that the
police have occasionally expressed concerns about. Somebody coming out
of police college is not sure about the extent or otherwise of their
powers in a way that used to be the case when you had serious
arrestable, arrestable and non-arrestable offences. I realize I am
going off on a slight tangent here and I will let you continue with
your question.
Q
300
Kitty
Ussher:
I think you need to be slightly more specific
about what you are alleging, if you do not mind me saying so, because
the reason I came back to this line of questioning was that it seemed
there were allegations being made that the introduction of biometric ID
cards for foreigners would lead to the police stopping people because
of what they looked like. I do not think you are alleging that although
you have some broad concerns about the way that the Government are
drafting regulations on stop and search generally. Is that
correct?
Gareth
Crossman:
If you create a document called a biometric
immigration document, which everyone knows is a document that people
who are not EEA citizens carry with them, you will also know that if
people who do not appear to be European citizens do not have such a
document with them it might mean that they are not in the country
legally. I am not saying that this will lead to improper use of power
as a matter of course, but that the creation and carrying of this
document might lead a police officer, who is stopping and speaking to
someone who is clearly not of European origin, to believe that an
appropriate question to ask is whether they happen to have any
identification with them.
I am sure that if the identity
card is introduced people will be asked for it routinely whether or not
regulations can be passed and whether or not it is a requirement to
carry it. I am trying to draw a distinction between what laws are
passed and the operational use on the street. That does not mean that I
am saying that these powers will be used improperly. What it means is
that when you get to regular policing practices such as arresting
someone under section 21 of PACE, which says that one of the grounds is
to establish identity
Q
301
Kitty
Ussher:
So you are not saying that they are more likely to
be arrested, but that when they are arrested this is likely to happen.
So someone is not more likely to be picked up as a result of the
Bill.
Gareth
Crossman:
You have said far more succinctly what I
have spent the last five minutes trying to say. Thank
you.
Q
302
Kitty
Ussher:
You do not think that people are more likely to be
arrested as a result of the provisions in the Bill. That is useful
clarification.
Gareth
Crossman:
No, I do not. I am sorry if I gave that
impression. That was not what I was
saying.
Q
303
Chris
Mole:
Could what you said apply to any immigration
document that anyone might be required to carry
now?
Gareth
Crossman:
It could, in theory. The
problemagain this is my concern about what will eventually
happen with identity cardsis that people are not in the habit
of carrying their passports around. People are not expected to do so.
Once the system is bedded in, both in relation to this document and to
the ID card, I would not be surprised if it became common practice for
people to carry them because it is convenient and easy to do so. That
is fine, as long as that does not lead to suspicion that failing to
carry the document is in itself suspicious.
Q
304
Mr.
Reed:
May I test everyones patience by stretching
this point a little further? I completely accept that previous social
frameworks may have inclinedI will be fairly specific about
thissome police officers to stop certain British citizens who,
frankly, were not of European descent. Do you not think that that
situation has changed and continues to change, given the greater
numbers of white, non-European immigration into the UK, and that better
police training could obviate what are understandable
concerns.
Gareth
Crossman:
I should reiterate again that I was not
implying that any sort of improper action on the part of the police
would take place as a matter of course. What I have said is that the
creation of these documents will increase the potential for this to
become a racially divisive matter. I sincerely hope that that does not
happen. One of the reasons why it would not happen would be if there
were police training to ensure that people do not get asked for cards
as a matter of course. But I maintain that the creation of this sort of
document has the potential to be racially
divisive.
Q
305
Damian
Green:
What has emerged in the last 10 minutes is that you
can take a view on whether it is fine to have a piece of biometric
information that you have to carry around with you at all times. That
is just an issue between us. But what is interesting about the Bill is
that to roll it out specifically to foreigners first will itself give
rise to the danger that you think, not unreasonably, will happen. The
roll-out method that the Government have chosen for the ID cards,
starting with this Bill and a certain group of people, may be a
particularly bad way of introducing the
policy.
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes, that is consistent with
Identity Cards: the next steps a few years ago, which
said that this is what will happen. The Government said, This
is what is going to happen. We are going to roll it out; we are going
to start off with non-EEA residents who are in the country for over
three months. At the time, I said that this might be one of the
consequences but, to be fair, it is consistent with what the Government
have said will be how the national identity scheme will be rolled
out.
Q
306
Mr.
Byrne:
Is it your understanding that those subject to
immigration control in this country generally have some kind of
document proving their immigration
status?
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes.
Gareth
Crossman:
As I said, I think that is what may well
happen. As Damian Green said, this is the first step to a roll-out of a
national identification scheme, and the issue of a national identity
card for every person. Whether or not you have to carry it, it will be
a fundamental shift in society.
Q
308
Mr.
Byrne:
You are clear, though, that there are no provisions
in the Bill to require people to carry these cards, and you will have
seen the contributionon Second Reading that specifically ruled
out our intention to do that.
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes. There is a difference between saying,
We will not pass provisions that will make you carry a
card, and ending up in a situation in which cards might be
carried by people as matter of course because it is easier to do so
than not to do so. That means that those people who choose not to carry
cards, or do not want to carry them, might be viewed as
suspicious.
Q
309
Mr.
Byrne:
But there is no getting away from the situation
that those subject to immigration control currently already have
documents proving their immigration
status.
Gareth
Crossman:
I do not for one second say that the
existence of an identifying document is not part and parcel of our
existence. Nearly every one of us has a passport or other identifiers.
I also totally accept that we are moving towards a situation in which
every one of us, non-EEA or not, will have a biometric identification
document.
What this
Bill does is allow for non-EEA residents, as well as having a biometric
identifier, to have unlimited information about them passed to an
unlimited number of people. My concern is less with the biometric and
more with what the scope of the Bill allows: mass information-sharing
between an unspecified number of bodies. That is what the Bill would
allow. I do not want to get overly drawn on the issue of biometrics,
when what the Bill does is allow for vast amounts of information to be
shared between a great number of bodies, with no limitation on the Bill
as to what that means.
Q
310
Mr.
Byrne:
But you would agree that there are limitations in
the Bill to limit the powers to take biometric samples, to check for
immigration purposes and procedures. The Bill specifically says that,
does it
not?
Gareth
Crossman:
Yes.
Q
311
Mrs.
Hodgson:
On the same point, which has bounced around a few
of us, as the Government intend to introduce a national identity
scheme, does it not therefore make sense to start with foreign
nationals having the first biometric cards?
Gareth
Crossman:
It has to be rolled out somehow. If you are
going to have a national scheme you have to start somewhere. I think
there is potentially a danger, which I hope does not occur, that it
would be unfortunate to pick a group of associated people, who are
perhaps more vulnerable, are non-EEA residents and who do not have a
right to remain in this country like the rest of us do. But, if you
have to roll it out, you have to roll it out, and that is the choice
that the Government have
made.
Gareth
Crossman:
I am not the Government. I would not have
done it. I would scrap the national identity register tomorrow, so I
cannot tell you how I would roll it
out.
Q
313
Mrs.
Hodgson:
But it is going to be rolled out and will be
incremental. The Government will start with foreign nationals, followed
by British citizens and then EU citizens. That will follow within a
year. The problem that you have identified will only last for a year at
the maximum, if it exists at all.
Gareth
Crossman:
I am afraid that I do not think that it is
fair to ask somebody who is absolutely and utterly closed to the
introduction of a national identity register the most appropriate way
to roll it out. I would not roll it out in the first
place.
Gareth
Crossman:
I have said that it has to be rolled out
one way or another, and this being it, I hope that attention is paid to
the potentially racially divisive consequences of rolling out something
aimed initially at non-EEA residents. As I said, however, you have to
roll it out
somehow.
Q
315
Mr.
Jackson:
On Second ReadingI have the
transcriptthe Minister said, as he did earlier, that migrants
already have documents that they present in order to gain entitlement
to services. He also said that the only change being made was that it
would be possible to check a secure document, rather than an insecure
one, which of course is a technical argument. Are you making a
distinction between biometric documents to be presented as of right and
the existing documents presented to gain entitlement to services?
Was that your point when answering Mrs.
Hodgson?
Gareth
Crossman:
It is a bit difficult to answer that. Not
knowing what the regulations will provide for, it is difficult to
answer such a question in detail. As I have said, the difference
between people being asked to produce something, whether a biometric
document or a passport, in order to establish whether they are who they
say they are, and being asked to do so in order to gain entitlement to
services is not problematic. However, to use that as a Trojan horse in
order to pass legislation that can say a lot more is
problematic.
Gareth
Crossman:
I think so,
yes.
The
Chairman:
There being no more questions, I thank the
witness for giving evidence to the Committee. Please wish your
colleague a rapid restoration of her
health.
It being
seven minutes before Four oclock
The
Chairman
adjourned the Committee without Question put,
pursuant to the Standing
Order.
Adjourned
till Tuesday 6 March at half-past Ten
oclock.
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