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Lord Phillips of Sudbury: My Lords, I support and have added my name to the amendment. I agree with every word that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, said. The fifth subdivision of the definition of,
is different in kind from the other four. They involve a degree of illegality. This does not. If we were to leave this in the Bill, the national register would be open to anyone at any time for any information on it, provided they fall within the extremely broad ambit of who has access to that data.
I would go as far as to say that the amendment is one of the most important that could be conceived for keeping the scope of the national register within some sort of bounds. It is very dangerous—when you get sunk into a Bill such as this, you constantly think of those working within the establishment, perhaps forgetting that sometimes information is the property of the citizen, and that our privacy of our information is a considerable civic liberty which we should not impinge on in the way that this paragraph would allow. I strongly support the amendment.
The Earl of Erroll: My Lords, funnily enough, I do not support the amendment in some ways. If we were stuck with just the national identity register, then the amendment would be correct and it should be supported, because I do not think that the national identity register will secure,
If the Government want to prevent duplicate benefit fraud, for example, there is logic to a central, hierarchical ID scheme controlled by the Government. But if that is what they are after, they should be honest and accept the amendment. If they really wanted to secure the efficient and effective provision of public services, which I would like to see, a national identity register is not needed, and instead we should have federated identity schemes that local authorities and so
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on could join, whereby citizens control their identities and it is unnecessary to hold the information on a central register.
I would like the Bill changed to include that acceptable alternative, and when the cost benefit analysis was done, the Government would work out that they could drop the central register and move to a federated identity commissioning scheme that would enable that efficient and effective provision of public services. I am torn, because I would like to table an amendment relating to a federated ID scheme and leave the Bill as it is to get rid of the national identity register. But I am sure that that will not happen, and in that case this amendment is more honest.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, if I thought that the purpose of the Government's wording was to enable government departments to trawl through identities and discover people who were not receiving the benefits to which they were entitled, I would support it—but I am pretty sure that that is not their intention. If they want to stop benefit fraud, they should say so and not use words that indicate something else.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I tell the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, that this Government have done a considerable amount to try to make sure that those who are entitled to receive benefit but do not claim it have the advantage of claiming it. He will know that we have put in place schemes to assist particularly those who are disadvantaged by age and disability—there is cross-checking made across that whole area to try to ensure that, for example, a person with a disability who needs extra money actually gets it. I heard the noble Lord's cynicism, but I assure noble Lords that this Government have already taken many steps to try to make sure that those who are entitled to benefit receive it—not least because if they receive benefit that takes them above the poverty threshold they do not get so ill and we can look after them better.
Perhaps we may stick to the amendment. It is not necessary, because narrowing the public interest to preventing illegal or fraudulent access to public services would not allow us the full benefit of the Bill. I should reiterate a point in relation to the register. I know that many people have said much about the register, but the database that we will have in relation to biometric passports will mean that that information will be held and available in any event. We need to understand that, and we would be looking to use this scheme to help to make the delivery of public services better. That means helping to deliver services more efficiently and effectively in the interest of the public as taxpayers and as users of services. Inefficiency in public services is of no benefit to anyone.
Transforming public services will be helped by being able to provide a secure, reliable and fast way of confirming identity. That is why we believe it would be wrong to regard the use of identity cards as simply a guard against fraud. Combating fraud will be one of the purposes of the identity cards scheme—a very important one—but not the only one.
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We should not limit the use of identity cards in helping to deliver better public services. It is not just a question of combating fraudulent use of public services; it is also about helping to transform those services. We believe that the public will want the introduction of identity cards to be used as a way of helping public services to deliver quicker and better services. Why should we have to keep filling in different forms with details of our name and address? If production of an identity card when seeking access to a public service can confirm our identity quickly and easily, surely we should be aiming to provide that. If producing an identity card enables address details to be confirmed, that will help both the public service and the applicant for that service.
I have spoken previously about the Criminal Records Bureau, which has to be certain of the identity of anyone who is seeking a criminal records check. However, mistakes are made in identifying people, and since 2004 there have been over 1,000 occasions where applicant details supplied by the Criminal Records Bureau to the police led to conviction details being matched mistakenly with an applicant. If one considers the number of John James Smiths who may have been born on any given date in any hospital in our country, one can see the way that mistakes can arise. An identity card check would provide a much more reliable method of confirming the person's true identity and so avoid those kinds of mistakes.
The Earl of Erroll: My Lords, I am sorry to intervene, but as the police national computer has the 10 fingerprints of applicants, why were they not checked? Or when they were checked, why was the biometric not good enough? Since the police national computer fingerprints are kept to a higher standard than those proposed on the new national identity register, I do not see how those 1,000 people slipped through, and if they did, it does not bode well for the future register.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, the way in which such checks have sometimes gone awry has been when there were very similar data such as very similar addresses, and human error has occurred in the system. It is by no means a matter of pride, because every effort is made to try to make sure that we eradicate mistakes. We believe that it would be appropriate to use the new register in a way that would make those mistakes more difficult. An identity card check would provide a much more reliable method of confirming a person's true identity and help to avert such mistakes.
As I have said previously, when it comes to any requirement to use identity cards to access public services, there are already provisions and safeguards in the Bill at Clauses 15 and 16. By restricting the statutory purposes of the Bill and the scheme therefore to only combating illegal or fraudulent access to public services, we would define it far too narrowly and would risk restricting the usefulness of the scheme to the public.
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I hear what the noble Baroness says about tracking data, but she knows as well as I do that, with the use of CCTV cameras, with our bank details from HSBC and other banks, and with the clutch of store cards that some of us have in our pockets from Tesco, Sainsbury's and Waitrose, there is a huge amount of data about where we go and what we do. It is not proposed that that sort of data will be utilised as the noble Baroness fears; this register will enable us simply to advance the proper use and efficiency of public services in a way that we believe would be very helpful to members of the public.
6.30 pm
Lord Selsdon: My Lords, I hope the Minister will forgive me, but I am confused at a much higher level than those on the Front Benches. Is she saying that all the information will be on one register, and will all that information be transferred to one identity card—or will there be several identity cards?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, there is going to be only the one identity card. I was merely responding to the suggestion made by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, that it would be a way in which to track our day-to-day business, every second of the day. I simply sought to suggest that that is happening already through other forms and that it is not the purpose for which we are going to use the register. The concerns that the noble Baroness expressed are not really justified, as there are perfectly proper administrative changes that we could make through using this register which would be helpful to the citizen to ensure that they were not unnecessarily burdened by administrative production of matters that could very easily be dealt with by the ID card. That is all that I was seeking to suggest; the noble Baroness need not worry about that.
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