Identity Documents Bill

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, it would appear that I may be the only Back-Bencher to oppose this legislation. I spoke during the Second Reading debate on the main Bill and I said then that it was necessary. I also said that the one mistake I thought was being made by the Government of the day was that they were not making such ID requirements immediately compulsory for all British citizens.

I think that this Bill is a backward step because we are in the middle of a major technological revolution that is transforming the country we live in and the way in which we carry out a whole variety of different functions, such as the way in which we access our services and the health service. Eventually it will transform the way in which we vote and do business over the internet, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, suggested. Yet, at the same time as this revolution is taking place, here we are going backwards and taking away biometric identification cards, which would allow people to access a whole range of services in different ways—something that they cannot do at present but would be able to do in the future.

However, the point is that all of us will be able to do that. The Minister introducing the Bill has an ID card hanging round her neck, as do I. We all have to have an ID card to be Members of this House: we have to produce some form of identity to get into the building. Even visitors who come into this House now have to have their photographs taken to ensure that we know who they are when they walk round and to ensure that they cannot switch identification with someone else. I have a wallet full of cards which give me various rights of access. The noble Baroness in front of me, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, is busily saying that, “It’s not this and it’s not that”. Does she want the drive to move forward with ID cards to rely entirely on the market, which is what will happen?

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, rightly said that most identity fraud takes place on the internet. That may very well be true. At some point the banks and the people who provide services on the internet are going to wake up to the fact that that fraud costs £2.8 billion and they are going to ask you to put some form of ID card into your computer to ensure that you are the person doing the deal. My noble friends are saying that some do that already. Therefore, the market will drive this forward. There will be a whole series of means by which we produce ID in order to get the services that we want but, if the push for that is market-driven—which is my major objection to what this Government are doing—that will increase the technological divide and wealth divide between those who have access to ID cards and those who do not. Perhaps it is taking a hammer to crack a nut, or whatever expression the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, used, but those who do not have such access are the young, the deprived, the poor and the people who are stopped by the police on our streets who cannot prove who they are. These are the people who need ID cards. These are the people whom we want to have some form of identity so that they can say, “This is who I am; I can prove it. If you want to put my ID card into a machine, it will prove who I am through the biometric system”. If we do not have some form of identity cards, we will find that the technological gap between the young and the deprived people who live in poor areas of our country and the rest of us will grow and we will live in an even more divided society. That is what this coalition Government are about, so perhaps I should not be very surprised by it. However, I certainly oppose the Bill and, to some extent, I regret that the opposition Benches are not opposing it more thoroughly, as they should be doing.