ID repeal Bill: “a good start, but bad in parts”

The Identity Documents Bill [1] receives its Second Reading in the House of Commons this afternoon. NO2ID [2] welcomes the intent of the Bill, which is to repeal the Identity Cards Act 2006 and dismantle the National Identity Scheme, but has identified some serious problems:

• The Bill, as drafted by Home Office officials, broadens further some of the already over-broad offences created by the 2006 Act, and worse, reintroduces some of the deeply flawed official conceptions of ‘identity’ inherent in the ID scheme – such as sentences of up to 2 years for quite legitimately, or accidentally through error or misprint, holding identity documents in more than one name [3].
• The drafting seems a bit casual – some phrases appear to have been cut and pasted from the previous legislation, with little thought as to context [4], and some clauses as drafted would perhaps make anything other than a cursory visual check of a person’s ID into an offence [5].
• The broad data-sharing powers relating to passports in Clause 10 of the Bill would immediately apply to millions of people, not just a few thousand willing ID guinea-pigs. And they would facilitate the reconstruction of an ID scheme in a slightly different form, based on the passports database – as proposed by several ID proponents, most recently David Blunkett.
• The Bill does nothing to address the issue of “ID cards for foreign nationals” — actually Biometric Residence Permits, required under EC regulations to be issued in the form of a card — which were blatantly ‘gold-plated’ and xenophobically spun by the last government in an attempt to boost popularity and demonstrate some progress on the scheme.

NO2ID’s full briefing is available online here: http://www.no2id.net/id-schemes/2010-06-08-identity-documents-bill-briefing.pdf

Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID said:

“The government is moving quickly to end the ID scheme. NO2ID applauds this, but we’ll be watching like hawks to see the job’s done properly.

“It’s a shame that such a good start should be so bad in parts. Scrapping the ID scheme was always going to be complicated – not least because the Home Office has been planning its survival strategy for years.”

Notes for Editors

1. Details, including the full text of the Bill and its progress through Parliament can be found here: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-11/identitydocuments.html
2. NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the
   database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate for a list of ‘database state’ initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing, and http://www.no2id.net/datasharing for how it all fits together.
3. “There are many reasons why people might legitimately hold documents in
   different names (quite apart from errors and misprints): they may have been adopted; a woman may use both her married and maiden names; actors and writers may use stage names, or noms de plume; people with ‘difficult’ foreign names often use an English equivalent in daily life; a person undergoing gender re-assignment may for a period have documents in both male and female names.”
4. “internal evidence suggests hurried drafting: cl.8(1)(g) refers to “every other place”, the words of the 2006 Act, where “any other place” would be more applicable”
5. “A literal reading of cl.4(1)(c) and cl.4(2)(b) – making it an offence to have in your possession or control an identity document relating to someone else with the intention of using it to establish personal information about them – perhaps make anything other than a cursory visual check an offence.”

Phil Booth and Guy Herbert are both available for interview in central London today. For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please contact:

• Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net) on 07974 230 839
• Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308
• Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166

2 Responses to “ID repeal Bill: “a good start, but bad in parts””

1. Coalition: Lengthening The Spoon « Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! says:

   2010-06-09 at 19:53

   [...] while this government is going to do many good things (for example dropping ID cards , though see NO2ID’s response to the proposed bill) of which we can be proud, there will also be things which are outright evil. I didn’t [...]
2. Dog Days of Summer Links And Stuff « AngloNoelNatter says:

   2010-07-23 at 00:52

   [...] For those of you glad we won’t have ID Cards (in my opinion, the current Government’s big A*- Plus) a note of caution from No2ID. [...]