MSPs narrowly voted on Wednesday evening in favour of Scottish government plans for a new identity database.

In a close Holyrood vote, proposals by the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Willie Rennie, to treat the proposals as primary legislation, thus subjecting them to full parliamentary scrutiny, were rejected. Instead, a government amendment to the Lib Dem motion was passed by 65 to 60 votes.

The Scottish government has agreed to await the results of a consultation on the proposals.

The plans have been widely criticised by civil liberties campaigners as amounting to the stealth introduction of ID cards after civil servants quietly published plans to expand an NHS register to cover all residents and share access with more than 100 public bodies, including HM Revenue and Customs.



Rennie told MSPs: “The proposal has the potential to cover 120 organisations across the public sector. This matters because the current diffuse storage of information has an inbuilt protection from crime and misuse that would be lost with one super database shared across the public sector.”

“We know the problem with putting all your eggs in one basket or putting all your savings in the one bank or business. We should be cautious when the government asks us to do the same now.”

The deputy first minister, John Swinney, insisted that the proposal was not about creating a new database, adding that privacy impact assessments would be a “necessary prerequisite” of any proposals put forward.

On Monday, the UK information commissioner’s office warned Scottish ministers in a detailed letter that that plans risked personal privacy and civil liberties and had not been fully thought through.

