Julia Lopez
Main Page: Julia Lopez (Conservative - Hornchurch and Upminster)Department Debates - View all Julia Lopez's debates with the Cabinet Office
(1 day, 22 hours ago)
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Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) for his powerful introduction —he is certainly no tin of beans. He highlighted that this debate has united every party in this Chamber, including the Labour party against the Labour leadership. I commend hon. Members for the powerful contributions that they have made. I have to confess that I disagree with nothing that was said by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins), which is a unique thing—people will fear a coalition again. I even have some admiration for the glorious fence-sitting of some of the Labour MPs who still harbour some ambitions under this Government.
We are here because so many of our fellow citizens are demanding that the Government abandon their dodgy plan for mandatory digital ID. This is one of the best-supported petitions ever—nearly 3 million people are asking, very simply, for their relationship with the state not to be fundamentally rewritten without their consent. At the instigation of no one—apart from, perhaps, Tony Blair—the Prime Minister sprung his sneaky ID scheme on us in September in what by now has become a familiar pattern. A gaping hole emerges in Labour’s handling of an issue—in this case on migration, but it could equally be justice or the economy—at the same time as they are running some kind of personnel meltdown, such as a Deputy Prime Minister ducking tax or a Chancellor leaking a Budget. And voilà: out shoots from Downing Street some cack-handed policy announcement to get us all talking about something else.
Before we know it, we are hurtling toward mandatory ID, fewer jury trials, a horrible menu of new taxes on working people, and, who knows, maybe soon our return to a customs union on whose rules we will have zero say. That is why today we find ourselves debating the imposition of a mandatory ID, despite it being a platform on which no Labour MP in this Chamber was honest enough to stand, and a hapless Minister is left to field questions about the dead cat that his leader just threw on to the table, which is now getting smellier.
Dr Gardner
I acknowledge the strength of feeling from the people who signed the petition, but I have a genuine concern that we are not giving the correct level of information for people to say no to. Conflating digital IDs with issues such as jury trials and taxation is doing people no favours; we need to have a calm, rational debate about this one issue so that we can have a reasoned outcome.
Julia Lopez
One challenge is that we have had so few of the facts, because this is such a thin plan. The other challenge is that although there are people who support digital identity as a concept, this is about choice and the fact that this Government have no mandate for what they are doing. I do not think that the hon. Member and I are coming from that different a place, in so far as it should be people’s choice whether they have digital identity verification or not. This Government are proposing to rob them of that choice, and that is why the people in this Chamber are united.
Saqib Bhatti
I thank the shadow Minister for giving way; she is being ever so generous. It is not us scaremongering, or 3 million people being conspiracists; the fact is that the Prime Minister rolled out this scheme to deal with an issue that it will not solve, and everyone can see through that.
Julia Lopez
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he spoke powerfully in his contribution. I am sure that today we will hear no answers from the Minister, because behind this policy sits no plan at all. No Minister has any idea how much it will cost—the OBR reckons it will be £1.8 billion.
Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree with me and the thousands of people across Bromley and Biggin Hill who signed the petition that at a time of rising taxation and spiralling debt, the fact that the Government cannot even tell us how much this wretched device will cost exemplifies their irresponsible approach to our economy?
Julia Lopez
I completely agree. On the one hand, the Government claim there is no money left. On the other hand, they can suddenly find billions for bizarre schemes or the Chagos islands, or create policies on the two-child benefit cap that they could not previously deliver. They are just so intellectually inconsistent.
The OBR, as I say, reckons the scheme will cost £1.8 billion. Privately, Ministers are briefing that that is completely inaccurate. We have not even begun scoping it yet. I am told the Treasury and the Cabinet Office are now in a stand-off with one another about who will pay for this dreadful thing. Neither wants it, particularly as the Cabinet Office will then have to make cuts to other, much more effective digital projects, the kinds that would actually deliver better services.
No one will answer straight questions about how secure the digital ID will be, or into which areas of our lives it will creep. The Prime Minister tells us that digital ID will be mandatory only for anyone who still wants to work in Labour’s welfare Britain. Yet in the next breath he suggests that childcare, welfare and wider service access will all require it. This is precisely how state overreach begins: with reassurance in one sentence and expansion in the next.
It was very interesting to hear hon. Members making points about the police being able to access digital ID, or even about people needing it to go to the cinema. There have been no answers on the robustness of the Government’s cyber-security. This Government could not even keep their own Budget secret, and now they want us to trust them with this new system. Ministers point to Estonia and India as models, yet Estonia has suffered repeated breaches. India’s system, the largest ID system in the world, led to the largest ever data breach in the world, with citizens’ data sold on the dark web for the equivalent of £5 or £6. AI is now giving cyber-attackers the upper hand.
We have been given no sense of the extent to which digital ID will stem illegal migration, which was the Prime Minister’s excuse for introducing the idea in the first place. Ministers cannot even give an estimate, and that is for a simple reason: because it will not reduce migration. Can Ministers explain why those who enter the country by dodging the rules will suddenly become models of civic compliance, or why European ID schemes have done so little to stem illegal migration on the continent?
Mr Adnan Hussain
On the topic of migration, does the hon. Member agree that the Government’s claim that digital ID will curb immigration is made a farce by the Afghan data loss, a catastrophic failure of data security that ended up expanding resettlement on a large scale, which shows exactly why centralising identity data can backfire?
Julia Lopez
The hon. Member makes a powerful point. The truth is that channel crossings will continue until the Prime Minister puts in place a real deterrent and accepts that the “smash the gangs” plan is nothing more than a slogan. By pretending that his ID scheme is the answer, he fuels public distrust. When the crossings continue but law-abiding British citizens are allocated a mandatory ID, people will feel, rightly, that it is one rule for them and another for rule breakers—a loss of liberty for everyone because of a group of people who have no right to be here.
At least Ministers seem to recognise the emptiness of the migration argument, because none of them seems to use it any more. To add to the despicable dishonesty of the plan, it is now being presented as a benevolent effort to improve online services—no more rummaging for utility bills. The Prime Minister’s chief of staff even insists it will be a matter of choice whether to have a digital ID. How disingenuous! First, to oppose digital ID is not to oppose the modernisation of Government. It is not to oppose great online services for people. It is to say that we do not need a monopolistic Government ID scheme, which is mandated if people are to have those online services, and nobody should be suggesting otherwise.
The Association of Digital Verification Professionals has called what Labour inherited from our party
“a world-leading model for…data sovereignty”
that digitises liberty rather than dilutes it. In government we were able to provide trusted, simple and secure services without everyone being mandated to have a digital identity. Paper options were retained. Nobody was forced down the digital route. Privacy-preserving private identity providers, now absolutely hopping mad about Labour’s plan, are recognised as a way of giving citizens choice when it comes to digital credentials and dispersing central power.
Let us turn to the idea of choice and consent. If a Government-issued digital ID is mandatory for anyone wishing to work, then if someone wants a job they have no choice but to have one. At a time when Labour has made it more expensive and much riskier to employ people, they now want to add an extra hoop for everyone to jump through. Never mind the digital divide, either. Thousands of adults do not have smartphones. Labour has deprioritized gigabit rollout; its digital inclusion plan is a £9 million fig leaf. It is not bridging the digital divide, but widening it.
Conservatives oppose the Prime Minister’s mandatory ID plan in principle and in practice. It would alter the balance between citizen and state in a way that this Government have no mandate for. Conservatives believe that Government should empower citizens, not the other way round.
Before this House takes another step down this path, I ask the Minister to answer the following questions clearly and directly. Will the Government bring this matter before the House for a vote, and when can we expect digital identity legislation to be put before us? How much will this scheme cost? If the true figure is not £1.8 billion, what is it? Are Ministers creating a single centralised database—yes or no? Who will be forced to have a mandatory ID and from what age, because we hear that it could be mandatory from the age of 13? What personal information will be collected? Will biometrics and addresses be included? What security guarantees will the Minister put his name to when it comes to the robustness of this system? Nearly 3 million people want answers to those questions and more.
This Government have delivered nothing of what they said they would deliver— growth, political stability, competence—and delivered plenty that they never sought permission for. They are a Government who do not have the competence to run a bath, let alone a secure national identity scheme. It seems that many Labour MPs, including those in this Chamber today, now agree. Every day, they are openly jostling and gossiping about the Prime Minister’s demise. If they had any sense, they would make sure that this scheme dies with the expiry of his leadership and that any of the thrusting leadership contenders make a clear promise not to resurrect it.
The Prime Minister’s plan is unimplementable and utterly unloved, and it will be totally useless in delivering against its own objectives. So, before Labour sprays inordinate amounts of political capital and taxpayer cash on this digital ID dodo, it must wake up to that reality.
Josh Simons
I was told that I have 11 minutes, and I have about 10 more minutes of my speech. I will not be taking interventions, so the hon. Member can sit down and stop asking.
If we get this right, we will empower the most vulnerable: those experiencing homelessness, who are currently left behind. We will not accept the status quo. That point leads me on to the second principle. The National Cyber Security Centre will work closely with us to implement cutting-edge protections against cyber-attacks and identity fraud. I want to be specific about what exactly that means.
We are not, as many Members have asked, creating a centralised master database. The new system will be federated. Specifically, that means that there will be strict legal firewalls on what information can be shared where and a strong principle of data minimisation. People will have more control over their data in this system than they have now, because people will be able actively to control what information is shared about them and by whom. As my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law) said, in other countries around the world, such as Finland or Estonia, citizens are massively more empowered to control their data. Their consent is placed at the centre of the system—[Interruption.]
