I remember a leisurely lunch over the summer when a supporter of digital IDs told me how they thought Keir Starmer would reset his premiership. Alongside a reorganisation of his team in Number 10, and maybe a junior ministerial reshuffle, they predicted he would announce in his speech at party conference that his government would be embracing digital IDs. “It will allow him to show he’s willing to do whatever it takes to tackle illegal immigration,” was their rationale.
Sure enough, Starmer announced “phase two” of his government, reshuffled his top team and, on the Friday before Labour party conference, he duly announced his government would make digital IDs mandatory for workers. “We need to know who is in our country,” he said, arguing that the IDs would prevent migrants who “come here, slip into the shadow economy and remain here illegally”.
By the time he announced the plan, however, it was dead on arrival. Much like the reshuffle, now described by one senior Labour figure as “the worst reshuffle in the history of the Labour party” because of the discontent it fomented, the digital ID scheme has barely been mentioned since.
Cabinet ministers immediately expressed their concerns about the plan in private, describing the rationale behind it as incoherent, because people have to undergo right-to-work checks already. To some, it felt like a case of state overreach.
Worse, having been popular in hypothetical polls before Labour committed to them, digital IDs for workers turned out to be deeply unpopular upon contact with reality. Net support for the policy plummeted from +35 per cent in early summer 2025 to -14 per cent the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common. It was described as the “reverse Midas touch,” where association with this unpopular government turned a potentially popular idea into a point of contention.
Months on, compulsory Digital IDs have officially been abandoned by the government, in the latest of a string of U-turns under Starmer. Now the IDs will be optional when they are introduced in 2029, with workers given the choice of whether to use other documents to verify their identity digitally instead.
Government insiders say the reversal will still deliver all the benefits of introducing a system of digital right to work checks, without the negatives, by ditching the compulsory element which made people fear state overreach.
“The most important thing is that we make Digital ID so good that everyone wants to have it, not that we force everyone to have it,” one Labour MP says.
Number 10 insiders describe the change as a “barnacles off the boat” strategy, whereby distractions and difficult measures are abandoned to focus on the core message, which in this case is the cost of living.
Others are less convinced. One frontbencher describes this latest U-turn as, simply, “a shitshow.”
[Further reading: Why Keir Starmer has gone to war with Elon Musk]
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