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Lord Soley: My Lords, I am slightly puzzled by this debate. When I read the amendments, I assumed that the debate would essentially be about costs. When one listens to the debate or reads the article by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, in today's Guardian, it is pretty clear that the debate is still about the principle and this is becoming very close to a Second Reading debate.
I do not wish to go into it again, but if this is about the principle, bear in mind that many democracies around the world, which enjoy the rule of law, have identity cards. It is not crippling to the population; they are popular; and the idea is fairly popular here. I understand that saying the system will be costly undermines public confidence in the argument in favour of identity cards. As a party politician, it would be wrong of me to dismiss that as being without relevance. However, it seems to me that if the issue is about costs, I am not sure that the amendments address that at all. To give the noble Baroness her due, she focused on quite an important part: the tendering process.
I have a great deal of respect for my noble friend Lord Barnett who has a very impressive record on this. He has said that this House is at its best when it holds the other House and the Government to account. However, I am not convinced that it does it best in this way. If the matter really is about expense, frankly I would not have heard all these arguments before, as I have. I have heard them in the House of Commons and in the wider public area. So what new things are being said here other than, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, straightforwardly said in his Guardian article today, "I am against it in principle"? That is what it is really about.
There is a case for looking in detail at the expense, not because other countries have done it at a perfectly reasonable price and not because this country did not have an ID card before—which of course it did have in the rather special circumstances of the Second World War—but because we are employing so much new technology. The key question is how well the technology will work. Expense alone does not tell one that, which is why such matters are often better dealt with in the more detailed analysis of a Select Committee or a special committee of that type. I often
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wonder whether we would not be better placed to advance our arguments on the issue of costs if we did it that way.
It is true to say that if the expense of an ID card comes in very high and if it stays high, a great deal of political damage will be done to the government who introduce it. You only need think of the analogy of putting up the cost of the television licence. Think of putting up the cost of an ID card. Think of the initial cost of the ID card or, as my noble friend the Minister indicates with the movement of his hands, a driving licence. There is a range of issues and arguments around this, but they are not being addressed today.
I say this cautiously, because I am a new Member of this House and do not like to jump to the conclusion that I have understood all the subtleties of this place when I obviously have not. I worry, however, that if we, as political parties—whether Labour, Tory or Liberal Democrat—simply recycle the arguments that the parties had in another place, we do not enhance our status. We ought to be about enhancing our status as well as examining the evidence.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury: My Lords, before the noble Lord, Lord Soley, sits down, he said that he did not think that this was the way to hold the other place to account on this project. What would be the way to do that?
Lord Soley: My Lords, I indicated that if noble Lords are going to look at the technology and costs, they might want to do that in a much more detailed way in Committee, as well as questioning Ministers. The broad thrust of my remarks, however, was that most of the arguments put today, including by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, have been heard before. That is not a reason for not doing it again. I am not saying that it should never be done again. I am simply saying that it is probably not the most effective way of holding the other place to account.
We need to be much clearer. I think the noble Lord ought to come out and say "I am going to use every trick in the book to undermine the political credibility of this enterprise because I am against it in principle". I could understand that, and would have no problem with it. However, the noble Lord has put forward an amendment which—as my noble friend Lord Barnett said—is not very effective in doing what he, and certainly the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said they wanted it to do.
The Earl of Erroll: My Lords, as a Cross-Bencher, maybe I can assist the noble Lord, Lord Soley. We have now reached a stage where amendments are pushed. The Government have not listened to the arguments about costs. Whatever the noble Lord thinks about it, it is House of Lords procedure that, at this point, you would push an amendment to its limit to find out what the opinion of the House is. The fact that is has been debated before does not mean that it is not right now to test the opinion of the House, which I am sure is going to happen.
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It is not just political point scoring. In fact, that is why, at this stage, speeches should stick to the amendment and not wander off into other areas. By and large, most people have stuck to that. I am quickly going to do exactly that. There is nothing new in the arguments being put right now, but the problem is that the Government have not listened and come back with anything.
Every benefit has a cost. I think everyone knows that. In normal business and in running the country, one needs to do a cost benefit analysis. It is a complete waste of taxpayers' money if it costs you much more to do something than the benefit you get from it, if there are other, better, ways of doing it. For instance, I fully support a biometric passport which is about to be issued under the e-borders scheme. It will have international standard biometrics buried in it, will let you cross borders more easily and will get you through airports and other places more quickly. That is a good idea.
Something we should be worried about, however—everything everyone has said on this has been quite right—in addition to the things that the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, has said about his passport and other things, is that in order to deliver the benefits listed in Clause 1—for instance,
this system will have to interface with the police national computer. Alternatively, an index to the police national computer is needed; the national identity register is not. The costs and benefits for that need to be worked out. It may be cheaper to store everyone's fingerprints on the police national computer, with an index into it, because no criminal information is allowed to be stored on the national identity register. Again, that cost benefit analysis should be done.
Immigration controls are enforced with the IND computer. Biometric stuff is issued to new arrivals, and they are biometrically checked if they reapply when they come in. If the IND computer is to interface, for the purposes of the Bill, with the national identity register, then those costs and benefits should be weighed up and put before Parliament before we go into this expensive exercise.
4 pm
If you want to enforce prohibitions on unauthorised working, that information is held on the WPUK computer, which used to be owned by the DHSS—the DWP—and is now owned by the Home Office. That is the work permits UK computer system. It may be cheaper to have an index straight into that. You need to do the cost benefit analysis.
I shall not bore the House with the address issue now because I shall bring it up when we get to it, but the system must interface to verify addresses with what would have been—had it not fallen by the wayside about two or three months ago—the national spatial and address infrastructure effort, to bring together the postal address database. Not everyone lives at postal addresses. Many things are used to identify OWPAs—
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objects without postal address. You get them off the Ordnance Survey or various other things, which I shall talk about later. That will have to be sorted out first, and there will be copyright problems.
It is technically possible. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, when he says that, and the people who have put it forward. But the amount of change management and the operation involved for the individual departments that are not Home Office-controlled to get the true benefits is enormous. Until that is sorted out we should not be going forward, blowing an awful lot of taxpayers' money on something that could be pie in the sky. Blue-skies thinking is fine for universities, but it is not the right thing to do with central government money.
I do not want to bore the House, but before sitting down I shall refer to schemes such as federated identity—it is becoming much more popular and is much more an establishment thought—which allows the citizen control of his identity, and still enables delivery of central government services for the purpose of securing efficient and effective provision of public services. That can be done with a federated ID scheme quite happily. But I am not sure that the Bill would enable that to be implemented should a cost benefit analysis show it as the best way forward. I am trying to work on later amendments in case, three years down the road, we decide to go that way instead of using the national identity register.
The cheapest is not always the best, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, said. We have to consider the whole life costs and the costs of support later on. We must be very careful about the temporary process.
There are little things to consider. I worked with smart cards 10 or 12 years ago. A letter from the Home Office states that,
It may be with new cards; I do not know.
When that letter compares Hong Kong and Spain, I realise that the Home Office has missed the point. The problem with cards in general is that in this country we get icy windscreens in winter. The thing nearest to hand for many is a plastic card. A credit card is useful because people can get goods and services with it. An ID card will not be very useful so, in preference in future, people will use their ID card to wipe their windscreens. Unfortunately chips pop out and delaminate.
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