Lords rejects compulsory identity cards

Lords voted by 227 to 166 to amend the bill so that those looking to renew their passports will not be forced to register for an identity card at the same time

The House of Lords last night rejected a key motion in the government's controversial bill to introduce ID cards, setting it on a collision course with the House of Commons. 

The Lords voted by 227 to 166 to amend the bill so that those looking to renew their passports will not be forced to register for an identity card at the same time.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke has vowed to modify the bill to defeat the Lords, maintaining that ID cards were a manifesto commitment. 

The Labour manifesto for the last election stated: "We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports." 

However, peers attacked the current scheme as not voluntary, since the cards would soon become required for all citizens renewing a UK passport and could not therefore be described as voluntary.

Conservative peer Baroness Anelay of St Johns denied this argument, saying that the amendment did not breach the Salisbury Convention. 

This agreement between the Labour and Conservative parties states that neither party would, when in opposition, vote at a Second Reading against legislation that was set out in the governing party's manifesto, or seek a wrecking amendment to it.
"There is nothing in this amendment against the Salisbury doctrine, but there is a great deal in it for the voluntary approach promised in Labour's manifesto," said Baroness Anelay.

"This House is surely entitled to stick to its guns on a matter which the Constitution Committee of this House said represents a fundamental change in the relationship between state and people, and where that fundamental change was not set out in the manifesto."

The element of compulsion was also a sticking point with the Liberal Democrats. "If this Bill really was just about identity cards, many of us would have few misgivings, if any," said Lord Phillips of Sudbury. 

"If the cards were voluntary, the same would be true. But we have here a Bill that is compulsory; that would require 40 million plus citizens to be interviewed for the purposes of taking out an ID card, although I accept that if they were getting a passport at the same time they would make only one trip.

"That gives the home secretary 61 order-making powers that carry heavy penalties for citizen failures and, above all, that has attached to it a major database of our private information, some of it highly personal."

But Labour peer Lord Gould of Brookwood accused the Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers of ganging up on Labour through an increasingly close alliance "which has turned in time to something approaching courting". 

"Sadly it is now impossible to tell where the Conservative benches end and the Liberal Democrat benches begin," he said.

"The issue today is the spurious use of the concept of 'voluntary', a piece of spin of the kind that I thought that most of us, including me, had given up some time ago. Despite attempts to distort the manifesto, I see it as quite plain."