Oliver Letwin – 2002 Speech on Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud

The speech made by Oliver Letwin, the then Shadow Home Secretary, in the House of Commons on 3 July 2022.

I am grateful to the Home Secretary for his statement and for his courtesy in letting me have an early copy.

If the Home Secretary is asking the country to debate a strictly defined benefit entitlement card, the purpose of which is to prevent fraud, the Conservative party will strongly welcome it. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) proposed it when he was Secretary of State for Social Security. He began to implement the mechanism for such a card because he was hugely determined to cut fraud. Ironically, the current Government aborted that implementation.

However, is the item about which the Home Secretary seeks to consult a strictly defined benefit entitlement card? I confess that, having read through the paper and listened to his statement, I am still not clear.

In the first paragraph of the consultative paper, the Home Secretary states:

“A universal entitlement card scheme would…establish for official purposes a person’s identity so that there is one definitive record of an identity which all Government departments can use if they wish”.

What, if anything, does that opaque and gnomic sentence mean? What does the Home Secretary mean when he suggests that the card is one,

“which all Government departments can use if they wish”?

Does the Home Secretary recognise the real and widespread scepticism and anxiety engendered by such utterances when they come from a Government and a Department, which, under his stewardship and in the past few months have sought to introduce vast new powers for Departments of State and other public agencies to interrogate aspects of people’s lives? Those proposals have been withdrawn only under a hail of parliamentary and public protest.

Does the Home Secretary realise that these opaque utterances are bound to be read in a certain way by a public who have come to understand that the language of liberty is usually far from his lips, and to understand also his intense suspicion of the judiciary and judicial processes? Does he realise that such opaque statements are bound to be worrying when they come from a Government who, in discussing the double jeopardy rule, and advancing the European arrest warrant, have paid scant attention to the significance that most of us in the House still attach to the presumption of innocence in English law?

If these are unreal fears, why is the Home Office in the lead on this matter? Why is a benefit entitlement card the proper pre-occupation of a Department that is not responsible for administering the benefit system? How will an entitlement card that is genuinely an entitlement card improve the criminal justice system for which the right hon. Gentleman’s Department is largely responsible? If the police will not be able to demand production of this card—as the Home Secretary’s paper and statement suggest—what effect can the card possibly have on street crime, or any other crime apart from fraud?

I fear that neither the Home Secretary’s statement nor his paper present to the British public a clear proposition that can foster a rational debate. In place of clarity and definition, we have obscurity and spin. This issue is too important an area of our national life, too central to the protection of society against fraud, and too fundamental to the preservation of our liberties, for us to accept such obscurity and spin. Will the Home Secretary assure the House that in the coming days and weeks he will make it clear what he is actually asking us to debate?