Select Committee on European Scrutiny Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)

MR LIAM BYRNE MP, MR NEIL CLOWES AND MS PAULA HIGSON

6 DECEMBER 2006

  Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome, Minister. We are very pleased that you could manage to come along.

  Mr Byrne: It is a pleasure.

  Q2  Chairman: You might first want to introduce your team to us.

  Mr Byrne: On my left is Paula Higson, who is a Director at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and she oversees biometric residence permits and runs the managed migration business at IND. On my right is Neil Clowes who has got a particular specialism in matters European.

  Q3  Chairman: You know, Minister, this issue has been with us for some time.

  Mr Byrne: Yes.

  Q4  Chairman: It is a portfolio that needs to be moved on. Your predecessor did in fact correspond with us in the past. We are looking for an explanation in, I stress, plain words because I think people are beginning to find the technocrat language used in a lot of the replies not easy to understand or assess. So we are looking for language that people who may be interested in the work of this Committee will understand, without having a degree in computer science. In your letter of 5 July you will recall you distinguished between the "minimum" biometric residence permit and the "incremental" version which was the Government's preferred option, which did seem to put the costs up significantly. Would you explain the difference between the two, particularly in terms of their benefits?

  Mr Byrne: Yes, the key difference between the two is that the minimum was a secure document which we planned, I understand, to issue in the form of a vignette, so a traditional sticker that is plastered in a passport. It has got a couple of important security features. Probably most obvious is the scanned picture of the face. The incremental version has got a couple of important differences, one of which is the embedding of a chip. The embedding of the chip plus the record in our own biometric databases allows you to deliver checks which are important in, I think, two regards. The first regard is that it allows businesses who have got readers with the ability to basically decode the data on the chip to do a local cross-check, a sort of technical interrogation of the card, which provides a level of authenticity over and above a merely visual check of the picture. In order to counterfeit that you would need the ability to unlock the chip, using a pretty standard technical scheme called PKI, and then recode different data onto the chip. I think perhaps more importantly for us is that the second level of checks allows, for example, officers from the Immigration Service, when they find individuals, to use mobile quick scanners to take somebody's biometric, such as a finger print, and then check that against a central database record. It is conceivable in the future that organised crime may find the ability to unlock and counterfeit chips on a document. It is far less conceivable that they will be able to interfere with centrally held database records on a central database. What we are trying to do is really increase the levels of security which are attached to the document. I apologise, I do not have a degree in computer science but I did spend most of my career in the IT industry, so you will have to pull me up when I start wandering into jargon territory.

  Chairman: Nia Griffith?

  Q5  Nia Griffith: I would like to explore this business of costs further. You have said the estimated set-up cost of the biometric residence permit has gone up from £24 million to £60 million and the estimated running cost from £15 million to £56 million. These seem to be extraordinarily large increases. Perhaps you could explain why those increases in the estimates have occurred? What has changed since the first estimate you made?

  Mr Byrne: Let me preface this answer with an important caveat, which is that I am glad to have been able to come along today to answer some of the questions that are in the documentation, but since before the summer I have been undertaking a review of our identity management plans at the Home Office on behalf of the Home Secretary. What struck me very clearly is that we need to be bringing together our plans for biometric residence permits, which have developed over the last couple of years since the European regulations have moved on, with our plans for ID cards for British citizens. Both ideas are really designed to tackle the same kinds of problem. What the Prime Minister and Home Secretary have asked for is a strategic action plan on ID cards and a specific supplement before Christmas to that plan on how we use identity management to tackle illegal immigration. What I can say is to a degree limited before that report is published and it is also fair to say that I anticipate that some of the cost estimates that we have been able to provide to the Committee, although they were an accurate reflection of what the Home Office thought at the time, I do not think are to be a final word because until we have that action plan in place, we cannot then go on to undertake a revised series of costings and a revised cost-benefit analysis. We do need to do that and we will present back to the House in the six monthly ID card cost report our final estimate. I apologise to the Committee that is a slightly longwinded preface. Of course as a former member of the Committee I would be delighted to come back and talk a bit further when those plans are produced. To answer your question directly, the key reasons that the costs have changed are that you are having to issue a different product. Issuing a vignette in a passport is something that we do already and we have got quite a well-established infrastructure for issuing that kind of technology, if I can call it that. By issuing biometric residence permits in the form of cards and with embedded chips which are effectively microprocessors, you are automatically putting up the volume cost of the secure document that you are actually issuing, but you are also incurring some technical setup costs. In order to change business processes in order to issue different kinds of things we would need to put in place different issuing systems, different technology, and different infrastructure as well. That is why both the set-up costs and running costs have changed in that way.

  Q6  Nia Griffith: You do not seem to have made any reference to the actual numbers that you are thinking that you are going to need of these. You talk about apportioning out the costs over 10 years, but is there any accurate estimate of the amount of these you are actually hoping to issue?

  Mr Byrne: At this stage before we publish the action plan on ID cards and its supplement I would be constrained in what I can answer. We would welcome the Committee's views on where they saw the priority for issuing these cards. The broad strategic intent that the Home Office has set out, and which the Prime Minister repeated in his press conference recently, is that we want to create a much more difficult environment in this country if you are here illegally. We said in the IND review a bit before the summer that we wanted to systematically close down the privileges of being in Britain if you are here illegally, such as the privilege to work and the privilege to access benefits. I think biometric identification helps to do that. It gives employers a much greater ability to check whether someone is who they say they are because we can back them up on that with visa application services. The DWP are obviously interested in shutting down benefits for those who have no right to be here or shutting down benefits for those who have left the country. It could well be that the banking industry are interested in how they access this kind of technology because, after all, if you are here illegally and you are working then wages are technically the proceeds of a crime. Banks are under all sorts of obligations to report through suspicious activity reports if proceeds of a crime are being channelled through their organisation, either remitted home or recycled in the banking industry. So I think there is still a debate to be had about exactly how widely and how quickly we should be rolling out biometric identity to third country nationals. We will express some first thoughts when we publish the action plan on ID cards before Christmas. It is a subject we should have a debate on and on which we welcome the Committee's views.

  Q7  Nia Griffith: Can I just pursue this a minute Chairman, please. You are saying that these figures do not bear any relation to the number of residence permits that you think you will be actually issuing.

  Mr Byrne: As I say in my caveat, I think these numbers are not the final numbers. I think they will be updated.

  Q8  Chairman: Uprated?

  Mr Byrne: Updated.

  Q9  Chairman: You mean they may come down?

  Mr Byrne: I would not hazard a comment on that at this stage, but the process we have got to go through now is set out the plan—what is it that we want biometric identification to do, what do we think the priorities are. A lot of people have said we seem to be deploying ID cards as a solution to everything but what do you want them to do? I think that is a fair critique. We do need to set out what the priorities are. Our first priority must be to do that. The second priority is then to revise our business cases. And then the third priority is to present an updated cost report to Parliament in line with the ID Cards Act. So I think those are questions that will be clarified over the next three or four months. I just wanted to be upfront with the Committee about that.

  Q10  Mr Borrow: In your letter to the Chairman of 5 July you attached a table to it which broke down in three headings the benefits of biometric residence permits and those headings were: contribution to the wider national identity scheme; improvement to immigration control; and compliance with EU legislation. I would be interested in hearing a little bit more detail on that. In view of the fact that your Department is reviewing the whole ID card project including what you want from it, does that have any impact on the benefits you claimed in July as against the benefits you anticipate when this review has been completed?

  Mr Byrne: Let me go through those objectives in reverse order. It is worth, I think, just noting that the EU is still to finalise the precise specification of biometric residence permits. They set out in the Regulations (which I think are the precise subject of the Committee's scrutiny) their direction of travel; a direction of travel we are happy with, but it may well be something the Committee wants to return to when that precise investigation is locked down. The subject of immigration control is an important one because I see the national identity system as basically allowing us to do three things. First, it will allow us to introduce much more sophisticated vetting and storing of storing biometric details for those nationals from 108 different countries that we currently require visas from. It will allow our consulates abroad to actually check fingerprints that they receive from visa applicants with the government databases here. Interestingly, in tests that we have already done in nine posts abroad, we have already found something like 1,400 people who we have deported for one reason or another trying to sneak back into the country lying about their identity. It allows us to create that first ring of defence which is quite well away from our shores. The second security which it allows us to strengthen is the security controls on the primary line here in the UK. I was at Heathrow Airport this morning looking at a pilot called miSense, which is a system which takes biometric identity and actually accelerates people through automated travel gates once a number of background checks have been done on them. So, if you like, they have a record which is enriched through a different kind of vetting. Because we have locked that individual down to a single identity we are able to trust them with the ability to speed through immigration gates. It allows us then to redeploy immigration officers to less robust parts of the border. It allows us to strengthen the primary line. It also allows us to strengthen IND's ability to enforce immigration rules in country because it allows us to biometrically check people that we find on illegal working operations, for example, in country and check they are who they say they are. Once people are then in the criminal justice system it allows agencies to share records much more effectively. One of the eight priority actions that the Home Secretary set out after the foreign national prison incident not long after he took office was the need for a single identifier which the Police, Prison Service, Immigration Service and others can share. Locking down an individual to a single identity is critical to our ability to deport people because what typically slows down deportations are arguments with foreign countries about whether a national is indeed one of theirs. If we go back to the start and if we have already captured people's identities when they have applied for a visa, it is much easier for us to say, "This individual came from your country; they applied for a visa." Biometric residence permits are an important part of the need to develop this national identity system which allows us to strengthen the immigration system overall. The first point is the contribution to the identity scheme as a whole. We have said that we want to introduce biometric residence permits for foreign country nationals in 2008 and we have said that we want to introduce identity cards for British citizens in 2009, so the way in which this system helps is that it allows us to get into the rhythm and routine of issuing cards to a smaller population and it allows us to test different ways of issuing cards effectively. There is a lot we will learn from this which will then be of benefit to the rest of the country when the ID card is brought online the following year.

  Q11  Mr Hoyle: The biggest problem is they are not going to come via Heathrow. The majority will come through other routes and that is half the problem. You can have all the biometric tests in the world; if people do not come through a route that has got security posts on it, the whole thing is flawed from start to finish. Of course, the other thing is if people are coming from China, China refuses to take them back. What do you do then?

  Mr Byrne: This is a subject very close to my heart. There are two points here. The first is that when we issue biometric visas abroad, that is the first stage of a two-part security process that we envisage before people actually land here in the UK. Once people have been issued with a biometric visa they will then check in, and we support that process of check-in through a global network of airline liaison officers who have been enormously successful in, for example, helping deny authority to travel to about 30,000 people last year. Once people have checked in though, whether they have a biometric visa or a document held by a government which we trust that we do not ask for visas from, there are then a range of electronic name checks which are conducted against watch lists here in the UK; not just Immigration Service watch lists but also watch lists from other countries as well. That allows us to do a couple of things which are important. The first when we start using advance passenger information we can do that name-based vetting before people take off. So it allows us to deny authority to carry the people that we are concerned about before they take off. Once people are in the air, it allows us to risk-profile the flight before arrival and then redeploy Immigration Service officers to meet that flight if we are concerned about it. Between now and 2010-11 there is judgment involved but it is judgment based on risk-profiling passengers, if you like, on a particular vehicle heading our way. It sounds like your concern is that people might not be coming to Heathrow, they might be coming to a minor port. Have I caught that exactly.

  Mr Hoyle: For somebody to get on a plane they have to have a passport or an identity, so all we have to do is photocopy the identity. You do not even have to spend these huge amounts of money to achieve what you are trying to achieve. What happens is by the time they get here they have lost their documents or destroyed them and the idea is they say, "I am not from that particular country, I am here as an asylum seeker." If you had photocopied the passport before they got here and they came with them on the plane you could say, "I am sorry but when you got on the plane this was your passport; you are going back." That seems a very quick, easy way to do it and it will save you billions. The point I am trying to get to is great, if you are going to come through the orthodox route. The reality is that people who are desperate do not come through the orthodox route. They will come through on the back of wagons jumping out in Kent. They will come through ports and container units all over. The problem is you could have as much wonderful new identity kit as you want but it just does not work.

  Chairman: A fantastic scenario but unfortunately it is not within this remit.

  Mr Hoyle: Do you not think you are wasting money? That is the truth of the matter on the kit you have got.

  Chairman: Can I bring Angus Robertson in.

  Q12  Angus Robertson: Sticking with this area of inquiry, Minister, you have talked about risk-profiling, you have talked about tests and you have talked about pilots. I think this Committee would be quite interested in the quantification of the benefits. You have some initial testing that shows that it would be of benefit in a number of scenarios but hard, quantifiable benefits would be useful.

  Mr Byrne: Absolutely, and this is where I am afraid I have to go back to an earlier answer and say that I think our first step is to set out our priorities with greater clarity than has been done so far for how we see identity management—

  Q13  Angus Robertson: Feel free to.

  Mr Byrne: —supporting the fight against illegal immigration, and that is the plan that we have been asked to publish before Christmas. On the back of that we then have to undertake the business case analysis in order to quantify the benefits and set them against the costs which we believe are involved. Those business cases then go through a number of government checks, so they have to go through the Home Office Investment Board for a start, then they will need to be cleared by the Treasury, and they will need to be cleared by the Office of Government Commerce as well. At that stage we get the green light to go ahead and my goal is to report back early to Parliament on the outcome of that analysis in the next six monthly report that we present on the national identity scheme as required by the Act. I completely agree that the quantification needs to be set out. What I am saying is that following the review that I am undertaking with the Home Secretary that is one of but three steps over the months to come.

  Q14  Angus Robertson: We will have to wait to find out what the quantifiable benefits are.

  Mr Byrne: I will come back to the Committee to talk that through with you.

  Q15  Angus Robertson: Just a slight follow-up question in terms of quantifiable benefits or the intra-governmental discussions on the subject you have just alluded to. The use of such documentation also impinges on devolved institutions, and you are probably aware that the Scottish Executive has already said that ID cards will not be used within Scotland's National Health Service, unlike plans that are being rolled out in England. Could you tell the Committee what discussions you have had with Scottish Executive ministers about how these plans impinge on devolved areas?

  Mr Byrne: During the development of the strategic action plan I understand that there has been engagement at an official level. I obviously speak to the First Minister about immigration matters pretty frequently. As you know, I was in Scotland not too long ago to talk about a whole range of immigration matters, and before we finalise these plans we will talk through some of those issues again with the First Minister. The real opportunity though for the discussions is actually in the months ahead because what the Prime Minister said in his press conference is that once we publish the strategic action plan on identity cards we then have to go through a process of understanding in much greater detail how identity cards will be used in particular parts of public services but also the private sector. You will know that the Chancellor has got Sir James Crosby working for him on how the private sector can exploit identity cards. I think it is at that level when we get down to the detail of how the applications of identity cards are going to be used that we really need to be getting down to the levels of detail with colleagues in devolved administrations.

  Mr Hamilton: Minister, notwithstanding the point you are making, I am getting kind of confused. You are able to give a calculation on the increase in the costs that are expected, both the running costs and indeed the costs coming through, but you are not able to talk about what the quantitative measures are and what the benefits are going to be. You never answered the first question and that was how many people are expected to come in? It was asked three times and you are still not able to tell us how many people are coming in. What I am getting mixed up with here is how can you get a calculation of a figure when you have no other facts to back that up?

  Q16  Chairman: You might also answer the question which is contained in Mr Hoyle's scenario about would it in fact obviate the scenario that people keep repeating that people come in, destroy their passport or other documents, and then claim they do not come from the country from which you know they originated?

  Mr Byrne: There is some virtue in Mr Hoyle's thoughts. That is something that we are going to look at early in the new year, specifically the issue of the copying of documents. The issue it does not solve of course is that a very large number of those for example who claim asylum, and whose claims are then found to be unsubstantiated, are people who arrive at an asylum screening unit in Liverpool or Croydon, and sometimes they may have been in the country for some time, they will often come without documents and it will be impossible to track them back to any specific flight. They will often not tell the truth about their identity or how they got in. What we have to do is assess what kind of impact a solution like Mr Hoyle's would have on a problem like that. It is something that we are exploring. The issue with deportations though is typically not simply that people will not take them back—and you could name a number of countries—but those countries are asking for much greater levels of proof that a national did indeed originate from that country. That is why biometric visas are so important because they allow us to biometrically document people when they started leaving a country. The issue that that still leaves is the issue of clandestine entry. Indeed, clandestine entry will always be a challenge for an island. The work that we have done on exporting controls to Calais has been extraordinary so the number of clandestine entries in Kent, for example, has fallen very dramatically over the last few years as things like heartbeat scanners and CO2 scanners have been deployed out to Calais. The kind of systems we are talking about are no substitute for those physical controls to track down clandestine entry. On the issue that Mr Hamilton raised though—and I make no apology for being upfront with the Committee—until the strategic action plan clarifies priorities, I think it would be inappropriate to undertake a business case which set out the quantification of the different costs and benefits, and that is why I want to be open with the Committee this afternoon and say I do not think that these costs will be the final costs; I suspect that they will move. Let me give you a simple example of why they might. I do not think, for example, that the costs that were in this letter have yet been fully tested in a scenario where we bring together the work of the Identity Card Agency and IND, for example. There could well be infrastructure costs over the lifetime of this project which begin to fall. Again, I do not want to overstate where I think the Government is in its plans—

  Q17  Mr Hamilton: You are okay, you are not overstating it!

  Mr Byrne: —on costs, but what I think is important is to sketch out the process that we will undertake over the next two or three months.

  Q18  Jim Dobbin: This question is about departmental decision making and the delegated powers of Ministers of State. In the letter which you wrote on 5 July to Mr Hood, the then Chairman, you said that the benefits of the Biometric Residence Permit project "are still subject to departmental approval". That has confused the Committee. I am just a mere back-bench MP and I am always in awe of the powers of Ministers of State. I am in admiration of the powers you have. The question is: whose approval were you waiting for?

  Mr Byrne: There are three key approvals. One is that the Home Office Joint Investment Board has to approve the final business case. Either in parallel or sequentially we will seek Treasury approval and OGC approval as well. Where it says that the costs have not been subject to departmental approval, I should have explained that more clearly by saying that these are initial estimates of the cost of the project as it was conceived back in late spring/early summer, but, until the full business case is established, there will not be an investment decision submitted to the Home Office board. When the Home Secretary started, there were a number of issues that he wanted flushed out on the ID card scheme and this was one of them. That is why he asked for a fundamental review of the way the project is going to be undertaken. That will be documented in the plan we publish before Christmas, then it is the business case. At the business case stage, we will get departmental approval—the different approvals from Treasury and others in parallel—and then we will report on the costs as transparently as we can to Parliament.

  Q19  Jim Dobbin: Do we have a time scale or approximate time scale?

  Mr Byrne: My goal is for the plans to be published before Christmas, for the business cases to be completed and approved in the first quarter of next year or by spring, and then I will need to double-check when our next six-monthly cost report is due to Parliament. I think it is May but it may be April. That is the time scale.

  Jim Dobbin: Six months.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2007
Prepared 1 February 2007