Peter Fortune
Main Page: Peter Fortune (Conservative - Bromley and Biggin Hill)Department Debates - View all Peter Fortune's debates with the Cabinet Office
(1 day, 23 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
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?