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Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I greatly welcome the comments made so far in this debate. I hope that I will be able to explain to the House more clearly why I fundamentally disagree with this amendment. The noble Baroness says that passports do not constitute voluntary documents. However, she will know that what the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, said is correct and that passports do constitute voluntary documents.
No person in this country is ever compelled to apply for such a document. There are now provisions with which each of us, if we are desirous of having a passport, must comply. I think the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, suggested that none of the information contained in Schedule 1 would be required now. That is simply and plainly wrong. The information listed in Schedule 1 makes clear that it is already required for passport applications and so it is already held on the United Kingdom Passport Service database; for example, name, date of birth, nationality and address.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury: My Lords, I am going to save the noble Baroness some time. I never suggested that none of the information in Schedule 1 is currently part of the passport. I simply said that a great deal more information was required under Schedule 1 than is required for a passport, including personal data.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I am sure that that is what the noble Lord intended to say and I am grateful for the clarification. My note, and I accept that my note may be wrong, showed that the noble Lord said:
Of course, the noble Lord accepts that much of this information is already required for passports.
Viscount Bledisloe: My Lords, the noble Baroness said that nobody was required to apply for a passport. Has it never occurred to her that many people's employers may require them to travel? Granted, they can be sacked if they refuse to apply, but does she really regard it as very voluntary if you stand to lose your job? Does it therefore not matter because it is voluntary?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal : My Lords, of course I do not say that. What I do say is that we have to look
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at the position that we currently face. Today, each of us has to comply with the provisions set out in the current regulations when obtaining a passport. If we fail to comply with those regulations, we will not be granted a passport. When the biometric data, which we will have to include in order to have a valid passport, is introduced—and it will come in this year—each of us, if we want a new passport, will have to comply with those regulations.
The Earl of Erroll: My Lords, the Minister is about to do something she did in Committee, which is to confuse the biometric data required for the new passport under the e-borders initiative—which will be held on the passport and not in a central registry, and will be extremely useful for validating that the passport is yours locally, in, for example, an airport or other port of entry—with the biometric data proposed to be held on the national identity register. It is not the same biometric data, need not be the same biometric data and probably will not be the same biometric data as that proposed to be held on the national identity register under this Bill. The two things are completely different and it is dangerous to confuse them.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I hear what the noble Earl says, but he knows as well as I do that, as we move forward, to make our data compatible with others, biometric data will have to be included. I have made clear from this Dispatch Box that the Government intend that to be the case in order that we can have the most secure passports possible, in accordance with current understanding of good practice. That is what I refer to.
Noble Lords should be aware that the Government intend that, in due course, those improvements will come in whether or not we have this particular ID card. One looks at the current position. Noble Lords will know that we already have provisions in this regard, which are lawful, and have been deemed so by those who have looked at this issue. Indeed, it is right to remind your noble Lordships that the Government's intent in this regard has been very clear for a significant period. These amendments would make registration and the issue of an identity card optional extras for anyone applying for a designated document, such as a British passport or a residence permit for foreign nationals. We have always been clear that the identity card scheme is designed and intended eventually to become a compulsory scheme for all UK residents and that, in the second phase of the scheme, it will be a requirement to register with a civil penalty regime for failure to do so.
4.15 pm
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, if it has always been the Government's intention for this to be a
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compulsory system, why did the Labour Party not put it into its manifesto for the last election, for the people's consideration?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, we did put it into our manifesto.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I cannot find the word "compulsory".
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, we made it absolutely clear—we should not by any means misdirect ourselves—that we would reintroduce the Bill that had been before the House before the election. That is exactly what we did. These provisions were in the previous Bill. No one in this House should allow themselves to be misled in this regard. The noble Baroness is suggesting that we are playing at semantics on what "initially" meant. We made it clear that the voluntary nature of the scheme would be that we would roll out this procedure in accordance with passports as people came to apply for them—that that would be the initial stage. Then a second stage, with compulsion so that everyone had to have an ID card, would come about. We also made it clear that it was important to have that debate in principle.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt, but it really is not good enough for the noble Baroness to say that it was made clear. There was no reference in the manifesto to the so-called second phase or compulsion. How can that be clear?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, it was debated at length in the Commons and debated in this House. To put this to rest, I shall be happy to go through the chronology, because we need to make sure that the issue is finally dealt with comprehensively.
The first phase was to enable a sensible phased introduction of identity cards. Once passports and residence permits are designated it means that, as British nationals resident in the United Kingdom renew or apply for their passports, and as foreign nationals apply for or renew their residence permits, they will be entered on the national identity register and issued with ID cards. That should not come as a surprise to anyone, as I have said. When the Government issued our first consultation document in 2002 on what were then termed "entitlement cards"—the noble Lord referred to that in opening this debate—one of the options canvassed was for a universal scheme linked to passports. When we announced the decision in principle to introduce identity cards—as long ago as November 2003—it was made clear that there would be a two-stage scheme. Again, it was stated that the second stage would be compulsory but, in the first stage, as well as introducing a voluntary plain identity card for those who did not have a passport, it was made clear that the intention was to link the issue of identity cards to that of more secure passports.
Indeed, we stated in Identity Cards: The next steps—Cm 6020, the policy document published at the time—that:
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"By linking the card scheme to widely held identity documents most people will get a card conveniently and automatically as they renew an existing document".
When we published the draft Identity Cards Bill in April 2004, not only was "must" included in Clause 5(2), just as it is now, but it was also in Clause 8(6) in the draft Bill, which is equivalent to Clause 8(7) in the present Bill. Again, we were very clear that in the first stage of the scheme there would be no possibility of obtaining a designated document, such as a passport, without an identity card.
Paragraph 2.17 of the consultation paper on the draft Bill—Cm 6178—stated:
"Once a document such as a passport has been designated as an ID card, this will be the only form in which it will be available—i.e. there will be no 'non-ID card' variants. It would undermine confidence in the system if there were to be identity documents available on demand at different levels of security".
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