In mid-November, I found myself in a committee room in parliament – one of the older ones in the Palace of Westminster, bedecked with dusty portraits, the wallpaper a frenetic riot of red and green. The ancient décor stood in stark contrast to the futuristic topic under discussion: MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee were grilling experts on the potential – and potential consequences – of a digital ID system. A representative from TechUK, the industry body for the British digital sector, was explaining how digital verification schemes are already widespread in the financial services industry, as users of online banking will be aware. “What are they on about?” muttered a woman sitting at the back. She was wearing a visitor pass, and I watched her grow increasingly agitated as the session progressed, clenching her fists and biting her lip.
I was there to try to find out what was really at stake in this debate. Perhaps I needn’t have bothered. On Tuesday 13 January, eight weeks after that committee hearing and four months after Keir Starmer first announced the plans for digital ID checks for British workers to be rolled out by the end of the parliament, the government U-turned. By this point, public support for the policy had plummeted. A weighty report on digital ID published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change two days before Starmer made his announcement cited polling that showed 62 per cent in favour and 19 per cent opposed; by December, 43 per cent were against and just 38 per cent in favour. Plans for digital ID cards are still going ahead (for now, at any rate), but the mandatory element has been dropped, thus gutting a key element of the government’s original case.
When Starmer made his digital ID speech on the eve of Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, the move was presented as a way to tackle illegal migration, reducing the “pull factor” that drives migrants to risk their life crossing the channel in small boats to reach the UK, with its supposedly lax employment restrictions. But proponents have for years been making a wider case: that a digital ID scheme could revolutionise public services, making it easier and safer for Brits to engage with the state, saving money at the same time.
They believed that things had changed dramatically in the two decades since Tony Blair’s ill-fated ID card attempt. The vast majority of us share huge amounts of data every day: with our internet providers, credit card companies, and social media sites. We have become accustomed to trading data in return for convenience. The chorus of sceptics reiterating the same 20-year-old warnings of the advent of a “papers please society” and creeping state surveillance could be painted as paranoid scaremongers, out of touch both with other European democracies like Denmark and Estonia, where ID cards have never presented the same kind of existential panic, and with the modern reality of everyday life via smartphone. If you can use an app to bank, shop, apply for a mortgage and book a taxi, why not to view your NHS records, pay your taxes or vote?
The answer, as the fearful woman at the select committee could no doubt have told them, is that there is a difference between having the option to engage with public services via a new government digital ID, and being compelled to so because there is no other option. Sceptics might also highlight cybersecurity concerns, pointing to the long list of public and private sector data breaches and cyber attacks in recent years, such as the ransomware incident in 2024 that hit more than 60 NHS trusts and resulted in thousands of procedures being cancelled. What would happen if Russia, for example, were to hack and shut down the UK’s digital ID infrastructure?
These challenges are not insurmountable. Speaking to representatives in tech sector, experts in public policy, cybersecurity advisers and even civil liberties campaigners, I was surprised at the level of consensus from all but the most hardline sceptics that it was indeed possible to build in cybersecurity and resilience from the beginning to develop a digital ID scheme in a way that didn’t risk our privacy or make us a target for sabotage. There was also consensus, however, that if the government was going to go ahead with the plans, what mattered more than anything was public trust. While the examples of Denmark and Estonia were frequently cited by proponents of how digital ID can work, it’s worth noting that both countries have significantly higher trust in their governments than the UK.
Done well, I was told, a functioning and secure digital ID system could increase citizens’ trust in the state, putting them in control of their data and improving their interactions with government services by reducing friction. Done poorly, it would make things worse.
I find it hard to believe that No 10 did not get the same message about the importance of trust when scoping out a digital ID scheme for the government. The first chapter of the TBI report begins “Society is built on trust.” A similar report from June on the idea of a “BritCard” by Labour Together, the think tank behind Starmer’s successful Labour leadership campaign in 2020, puts a similar emphasis on trust. Yet the word did not appear in the government explainer published to accompany the policy.
More broadly, the government chose to strike a decidedly minatory tone with its announcement, focusing on the tough nature of the policy rather than the ways it might make citizens lives easier. While the press release did mention better access to public services, the emphasis was overwhelmingly on clamping down on illegal working as a way to tackle immigration. “A secure border and controlled migration are reasonable demands,” Starmer said. “Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK. It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure.”
“Is it about migration or improved public services?” asked a confused tech policy expert when I sought clarity on what was actually being proposed. Another policy expert pointed out that the system that would eventually be built would reflect the problem the government most wanted to solve. It seemed odd to them to start with the illegal migration angle and the introduction of digital employment checks, when the UK already as stringent right-to-work checks, instead of reducing the friction people face when engaging with the state.
There were other questions too: on digital exclusion (how do you reach the 4.5 million people who don’t have a smartphone?), on the impact on vulnerable communities, on the question of which private companies would get contracts (Palantir? Fujitsu?) and how to hold them to account. The more dystopian warnings centred on the risk of a system of a joined-up government data network, where the Department for Health could track a citizen’s alcohol purchases in a supermarket, or the Home Office could keep tabs on their movements. Other technologies, such as the increasing use of facial recognition, compound concerns of state overreach and what a future government of a more authoritarian disposition could do with these new powers.
There were, I was reassured, cast-iron safeguards that could and should be built into any digital ID scheme that made privacy paramount. But launching the policy with such a focus on giving the state extra tools to ensure citizen compliance did not inspire confidence that the government understood the emotional impact of what it was proposing, nor the need to take the public along with them. And if it had underestimated the psychological hurdles, how could it be trusted with the practical ones?
This is not the main reason support for a digital ID scheme tanked as soon as the government unveiled it. The consensus in Westminster is that it fell victim to Keir Starmer’s “reverse Midas touch” which makes any policy he announces instantly unpopular simply because he has announced it. But it does suggest a government grasping around for off-the-shelf policies it can present as fixes to address immediate political challenges (the threat of Reform and continued public angst over illegal immigration), rather than working out from ideological principles what it wants to do and why.
Even the experts I spoke to most excited about the potential benefits of upgrading government infrastructure to be fit for the digital age downplayed the immigration aspect, with some expressing disappointment the government had chosen to start there. And there was frustration over the government’s messaging approach on both sides of the debate. As Lord Blunkett, former home secretary under Tony Blair and a long-time proponent of ID cards, pointed out, “The original statement was not followed by a narrative or supportive statements or any kind of strategic plan which involved other ministers and those who are committed to this actually making the case.”
Back in that committee room in November, I could see both the positive case for building a digital ID system, and the risks of tasking a British state that is already crumbling to build, test and implement it in the remaining three and a half years of this parliament. I also saw where the backlash was coming from, not from technological luddites or conspiracy theorists issuing outlandish warnings about 5G, but from ordinary people who are quite happy to use their phones for any number of sensitive transactions in everyday life, but worry about cybersecurity, privacy, state competence, overrunning budgets, and what the government might do with these extra powers.
What I could not see was any serious effort from the government to address these concerns, or even make more than a surface-level argument for what it was doing and why. A policy this sensitive and far-ranging, that would if successful fundamentally alter a citizen’s relationship with the state, required planning, outreach, engagement and serious answers to the questions of accountability and transparency that everyone I spoke to agreed must be baked in from the start. In the absence of that, a digital ID scheme was always doomed to fail.
[Further reading: Jenrickism has arrived]
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