Overlooked - Liberty

Overlooked: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain 51
An extremely telling aspect of the debates on ID cards was the weakness of the justifications put
forward for their introduction. Possibly the strongest argument in their favour is that entry on the NIR
and possession of an identity card will improve access to public services. Even the scheme’s most
entrenched opponents could not disagree that a single identifier, which will be the point of entry,
contact and verification, could be of assistance in gaining access to a range of public services from
the NHS, to state benefits, libraries, and so on. However this hardly featured as a justification when
the Government was selling the scheme. Instead the focus was primarily on helping fight terrorism
and crime. As time progressed other reasons were put forward. These ranged from dealing with
illegal immigration to combating identity and benefit fraud.
During debate on the Bill, Liberty and others argued strongly that none of these arguments stood
up to any degree of detailed examination. It might be argued that there was the potential for the NIR
and identity card to be of some assistance in providing solutions. However, few outside Government
with any detailed knowledge of the scheme seemed at all convinced that the NIR was the most cost
effective and least intrusive way of dealing with the problems the Government maintained would be
solved. Many IT experts believed (and are still arguing) that the sheer scale and cost of the scheme
make it unlikely to ever work. Liberty’s Parliamentary briefings on the Bill explained its concerns over
the effectiveness of the justifications, and there is no need to revisit these in any detail again 113 . It is,
however, worth pointing out that even after the 7 July 2005 attacks in London, the then Home
Secretary, Charles Clarke, accepted that ID cards would not have prevented the bombings. Tony
McNulty, the minister in charge of the scheme, in the Autumn of 2005 admitted that they had
‘oversold’ the benefits of the scheme at a meeting of the Fabian Society. Such admissions were
more widely reflected in the general change of tone adopted by advocates of the scheme. Rather
than adopting the ‘panacea’ approach of the early days, emphasis was more on how the NIR as a
whole would be one of several factors helping fight terrorism, crime and so on.
So why was the focus on keeping us safe rather than getting better public services One practical
argument is that access to better public services can only be a convincing justification for a voluntary
scheme allowing people to ‘opt in’ if they so wish. However, the need for a commercially viable
scheme meant there needed to be a take up rate that guaranteed a set and significant number of
people every year. This could only be achieved through a compulsory scheme in which a certain
percentage of the population would be expected to sign up every year.
Until the final stages of the Bill there was a power allowing the Secretary of State to require
registration of groups of individuals identified by an order made in Parliament. This was removed as
part of a ‘compromise’ in order to ensure the Bill was passed by the House of Lords. New legislation
will now be needed before the Secretary of State can require registration. However, a lack of
compulsion would have effectively ruined the Bill as only those who volunteered to register would
be entered on the NIR. Because of this the Government insisted on keeping the power to require
people to register when applying for other ‘designated’ documents 114 . The passport was identified
as being the appropriate document as it guarantees that most of the population will need to renew
(and therefore register on the NIR) every ten years. This led to a rather farcical situation. The
Government claimed the removal of the Secretary of State’s power to require registration made the
113
All Liberty’s briefings are available at www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk
114
Sections 4 and 5 IDCA