Contribution
I thank the noble Earl and the noble Lord for their contributions. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, is asking me questions to which, as he very well knows, I am not going to give the answer. That is the whole point of the consultation, and across the Chamber, everyone knows this in reality. We want to ensure that the public can access public services in the same secure way as they access many things in today’s society, including banking. Most members of the public assume that there is this great big database; they assume that their data is being used. The reality is that there are these silos. This consultation is not proposing what the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Earl were suggesting. It is not saying, “Let’s create this huge database, which could be vulnerable”. Instead, let us make it easier for the public to access the services that they need.
On the questions about inclusion and accessibility, I met with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and his group, and I said that what we want to ensure through this consultation and digital ID system is a much more accessible system. We want a system that is more open to people who have been excluded because they have to produce or send a certain form, ring a certain number, or go through a certain call centre. What we are trying to achieve is greater accessibility.
The question of inclusion also relates to people’s access to the internet. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is not here, because I also had a meeting with him. There are strong, legitimate concerns, which is why we are conducting this consultation and why we want everyone in this House to participate in and make a contribution to it. The noble Lord made the same point: where there is exclusion, we can use community-based organisations—including post offices and sub-post offices—in a way that will ensure that people can maximise their opportunities to access public services.
The noble Earl asked me about cost, but there is no cost associated with this yet, because the system has not been designed. The system will be designed following the results of the consultation.
The consultation will not be limited to a certain number; it will be open across the board. We also want to establish a panel. Carnegie UK pointed out, in a letter to the Guardian, that a deliberative exercise in democracy—namely, selecting people randomly through postcodes—can produce a much more effective consultation. However, both approaches will be in what we end up designing.
I come back to this fundamental point. This is not only about how people access public services but about how they can determine the use of their data, so that they can set out when they want their data to be used for a particular purpose. For example, there are times when I might need to establish my ID. As I mentioned to the noble Lord, I occasionally go to a club—a dance club, by the way. If I am asked to produce an ID, I do not want to produce my driving licence because it has my name and address as well as my age—believe it or not, they sometimes do ask me my age. If they want to know my age, I am happy to release that data—but not my address or other things. So this is about how we establish that sort of process and about accessing public services.
In this day and age, for every private sector service we use, we expect to be able to access things. Tesco has more data on me than most government departments do, because it knows what time I go shopping, what I buy and what I favour, and it then sends me emails and messages about that. We have to try to turn away from the view that this is a rigid identity card system that will be on a national database. This is about public services, how people access and use them, and how they can control their data more effectively. I reassure the noble Lord on that.
There will be an initial consultation of 12 weeks, but that could be extended with the deliberative process. At the end of that, we will look at the results, and Parliament will be heavily engaged in that. No legislation has been drafted yet, because we want to see the results of the consultation and the scale of the project. I understand everyone’s concerns about cost, as well as some of the problems we have had in the past, but this is an opportunity to respond to people’s needs and to create more effective public services. Most people expect that from the private sector and we should expect it from the public sector too.