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Lord Campbell-Savours: My Lords, will the noble Baroness concede the principle that there will be a benefit to the taxpayer in increased taxation arising out of the introduction of the scheme?
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Baroness Noakes: My Lords, I am very happy to concede that it is theoretically possible for that to occur if the scheme were implemented in a way that was properly connected to the Inland Revenue, at a cost which was not disproportionate to the benefits that were obtained by the Inland Revenue. We have obtained no information whatever on any of that.
Before the noble Lord intervened, I was talking about the need for this ID card scheme to rest on large and complex IT systems. Many noble Lords referred in Committee to the Government's poor record in implementing major IT systems, but that is not part of our case on this amendment. However, freedom of information requests have produced no useful information on the gateway reviews or the risk registers that government projects are supposed to draw up. This is in marked contrast with projects in other parts of government. When we add this secrecy to the secrecy about costs, we see one of the most opaque and unsatisfactory set of proposals that Parliament has ever had to consider. For that reason, an additional process of scrutiny of costs and benefits in another place is an essential addition to this Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury: My Lords, my name is on this amendment with that of the noble Baroness. I shall make a few remarks on what, on any reckoning, is a highly important amendment—and indeed a highly unusual one, but then these are highly unusual circumstances, as the noble Baroness made clear.
When previously has Parliament been asked to legislate on an initiative of this scale, complexity and sensitivity without there being the fullest explanation and justification of the technicalities and cost? We are not, after all, ordering some new-generation aircraft carrier; we are bringing into being a system of surveillance of every citizen in the land over the age of 15, if the Government have their way, dealing not just with the identity of us all, but with a range of personal information, some of it highly sensitive, and that caught by the so-called audit trail.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, well put it, despite the novelty, scale and civil libertarian importance of the ID card scheme, we have received nothing more, as yet, beyond the estimate of the annual running costs of the Home Office alone, and then only in relation to the issue of passports and ID cards. That has been put—I like the notion of an estimate—at £584 million. I would not be as adamant about this—and, I am sure, many of your Lordships would not feel as keenly—were it not that what information we have been given has been extracted with as much difficulty as if we were pulling out the Prime Minister's teeth. Indeed, it was he—let us not forget it—who told the Labour Party conference in 1995, when Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, was introducing an ID scheme that was not dissimilar to this, the following:
"Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demands, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat in our local communities".
Hear, hear! Mr Blair was absolutely right, except that we are talking of wasting not a few hundred million pounds, but, more likely, billions of pounds.
I must confess that, in this game of blind man's bluff, the estimate of the all-in costs seems to have been honestly, conscientiously and indeed expertly endeavoured—if I can use that word—by the London School of Economics identity project. The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, has repeated several times that the information that we need to do our job is commercially sensitive and hence closed to us, because we are in the middle of the tendering process for the ID card scheme. The LSE group, as noble Lords will know, finds that excuse wholly unconvincing. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, talked of the reality of the tendering process. She, like the LSE, does not believe that explanation. But the overarching objection to the Government's refusal to give Parliament the full figures is constitutional. It is only because the Government have jumped the gun and apparently got as far as going out to tender that the issue arises at all. Frankly, that is their lookout. Apart from the presumptuousness of assuming that they will get their will in Parliament—and that says a lot—it would be the death knell for the role of Parliament in holding governments to account if they could so easily evade proper financial scrutiny. I have asked "greybeards" from around this place and outside for other instances of such bare-faced presumption. No one has been able to tell me of anything comparable.
As noble Lords will know, over the weekend the LSE group published a second report which reviews the conclusions of the first in the light of subsequent developments. The first report was issued last June. Sir Howard Davies, director of the LSE—and it should not be forgotten that until recently he was head of the Financial Services Authority, which knows a thing or two about financing—states in the introduction:
"As this second report shows, the Government have not been very forthcoming in providing details of their proposals. The LSE team stands by the cost estimates outlined in its first report, but changes to the policy made by the Home Office make it difficult now to produce a definitive assessment of the total cost".
That was the team's hope in producing a second report. Although the LSE project originally supported an ID scheme in principle, it expressed itself thus in the second report:
"In the light of the numerous inconsistencies and conflicts that have emerged, serious unanswered concerns that remain, project dynamics that are dysfunctional and potential outcomes that may be harmful to the public interest we can now no longer support even the principle of an identity scheme owned and operated by the Home Office. Its primary purposes remain unsubstantiated, its benefits remain unclear and its costs opaque".
Again, in case some noble Lords are unaware of the people who form that project, it includes over 12 professors from the London school, I believe.
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Part of their mounting unease arises from the Cabinet Office publication last November, Transformational Government Enabled by Technology. I cannot resist giving those noble Lords who have not seen it a flavour of its approach. It states:
"Government will create an holistic approach to identity management, based on a suite of identity management solutions that enable the public and private sectors to manage risk and provide cost-effective services trusted by customers and stakeholders".
I cannot also resist noting the bland managementspeak and the reduction of citizens to "customers".
A report by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers this month, Loser—Britain's identity crisis, states:
"The design of the system is based on unreliable and inadequate technologies that could result in privacy and security problems".
As has been made clear, the fact is that most government departments have not yet bought into the scheme, which means that they have not yet conducted publishable research into costs and benefits. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office stated last month that it could do none of those things until,
"policy issues relating to the use of or access to ID cards overseas have been clarified".—[Official Report, Commons, 19/12/05; col. 2483W.]
That general riposte is, in effect, repeated by many other departments. Given that last October the Home Office stated that it foresaw 44,000 private sector users and 265 government departmental and agency users, the need for the amendment and the homework that it will produce could not be clearer.
The LSE and the Home Office, in so far as the Home Office has come out of its bunker, disagree about more than they agree. They disagree about the number of changes likely to be notified to the registrar over a 10-year period. Will the contingency costs be £250 million or £1.2 billion? They disagree about the life expectancy of an ID card. Will it be three years, five years or 10 years? They disagree about likely card replacement levels through damage or theft. They disagree about the cost of biometric readers. Will it be £250 or £3,500? They disagree about the cost and likely usable life of mobile registration centres and biometric registration devices. I could go on, but I shall not.
When the LSE tried to enter into discussions with PA Consulting, which had been engaged by the Home Office for this scheme, the LSE was rebuffed. When it set up a meeting with the Treasury, it was cancelled by the Home Office at the last minute. As the LSE report puts it, it has perceived,
Therefore, the LSE's second report declined to revise figures in the first report and concluded that it no longer felt that the Home Office was the right or fit department to oversee the ID cards scheme, which it considers should be transferred to the Treasury.
3.30 pm
The only figures that give a convincing indication of what is involved are those estimated by the LSE last
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June, which, including the integration costs across government, come out at between £19 billion and £24 billion over 10 years, in comparison with the Home Office figure of £584 million a year. The order of difference is enormous. As my earlier quote from Mr Blair rightly implied, politics is about choices; and choices on how best to deal with security, crime, immigration, welfare fraud and so on can be made sensibly only if one knows roughly how much money one has to spend and what the alternatives are. Mr Blair mentioned having more community police, and many of us would say, "Hear, hear" to that; but all the other heads of supposed benefit are open to alternative ways of going about it.
Without this amendment, the citizen in public bars up and down this land of ours will tell us that we are buying a pig in a poke and putting the cart before the horse. This House should allow Parliament to do neither.
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