Parliament rejects discount for ID card holders

An amendment that would have given identity-card holders a discount on new passports has been defeated by MPs.

The House of Commons voted 302 to 189 against an amending clause to the Identity Documents Bill, which would have given those holding cards £30 off the price of their next passport. It also voted against a clause that would have transferred data from the National Identity Register to the passport database.

The debate, on Wednesday, concluded with the Identity Documents Bill — which will abolish identity cards for UK citizens, making existing cards invalid — passing its third reading without a vote. It now goes to the House of Lords.

Meg Hillier MP, who before the election was the Home Office minister responsible for the identity scheme and who proposed the amendment, said that not offering a discount was "mean spirited" to the 11,000 people who paid for cards. She said an alternative was to allow existing identity cards to continue in use for 10 years. "Frankly, those who bought in good faith from the trusted Identity and Passport Service have been diddled by this government," she told the Commons.

Scottish National Party MP Pete Wishart said that every party except for Labour had made it clear they would abolish the scheme if elected. "We actively encouraged people not to take out ID cards. For those who did so, under New Labour encouragement, that was their free and fair choice — tough luck to them," he said.

Immigration minister Damian Green dismissed the idea that anyone would be in financial difficulties as a result of not receiving compensation: "I do not think that anyone in really difficult economic and financial circumstances would have thought, 'What is the best thing to spend £30 on this week? I know, a very controversial ID card that will enable me to travel to Europe, but not anywhere else in the world. That's the most important thing to spend my last £30 on'," he said.

He added that most people with cards already have passports and that even if the cards had been retained, they would have been of little use as very few organisations would recognise them. As for offering discounts on passports, this would mean keeping the identity-card records in place for many years to check eligibility for a discount, and the government plans to destroy this data within two months of the bill becoming law.

Green had previously suggested that the data might be burnt, but he told the Commons: "I was only half joking when I said that and, sadly, it is not possible because the information is on various databases, so we are going to have to delete it."