UK government plans to roll out compulsory digital ID
The UK government plans to launch a digital ID in a bid to improve public services and allay concerns around illegal immigration, the prime minister Keir Starmer has announced.
Speaking at the Global Progress Action Summit in London on 26 September, Starmer said that digital IDs – provisionally nicknamed a ‘Brit card’ – would become an essential requirement for working in the UK, preventing people from slipping into the UK’s “shadow economy” and living in the country “illegally”.
He said digital IDs would make the UK’s immigration system fairer, a crucial step forward if government was to maintain what he called the “binding contract that our politics is built on”.
“That is why… I am announcing that this government will make a new free-of-charge digital ID mandatory for the rights to work by the end of this parliament,” he said.
“You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have a digital ID. It’s as simple as that.”
Checking a prospective employee’s eligibility to work currently requires employers to obtain key physical documents, although full online checks have been possible in some cases since 2022.
Digital ID is one component of the government’s overarching push to modernise the British state. Starmer also said that the scheme offered “countless benefits” to citizens, including giving them quick access to vital public services “rather than hunting around for an old utility bill”.
The proposed scheme – which will need to gain legislative approval if it is to be rolled out – has faced criticism from civil liberty groups and opposition members of parliament.
The Conservative party’s shadow work and pensions secretary, Helen Whately, said the scheme would force “law-abiding people” to “jump through more hoops” and burden employers with “more red tape”, while Silkie Carlo, director of the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said digital IDs would foster a “checkpoint society that is wholly unBritish”.
Liberal Democrat MP, Victoria Collins, who is the party’s tech spokesperson, said the Lib Dems could not support “a mandatory digital ID where people are forced to turn over their private data just to go about their daily lives”.
Read more: Digital identity dilemmas – and how governments are working to overcome them
British possibility, Baltic and Nordic reality
Many countries around the world have implemented national digital IDs.
Estonia has had mandatory digital IDs for more than 20 years, for example. Ten years ago, the country introduced an e-residency programme for foreign entrepreneurs, allowing them to set up firms, access business banking and payment solutions, and submit digital signatures recognised throughout the European Union.
Speaking on a Global Government Forum webinar last November, Katrin Vaga, head of international public relations for the E-Residency Project at the Estonian Investment Agency, said that digital ID had made Estonia “almost free of bureaucracy as a society”.
“I have seen how this digital identification system was built, step by step, [and] how everything was done so that every participant of our society would win from the experience,” she said.
Vaga added that thanks to digital ID, Estonian citizens save an average of five days a year each on government-related paperwork and form-filling.
“It’s a lot of efficiency that it has created in society on the citizen level and also for organisations,” she said.
Finland also has a national digital ID system delivered by Finnish banks, mobile operators, and the Finnish government. On the same webinar, Teemu Kääriäinen, senior advisor in the Public Sector ICT department of Finland’s Ministry of Finance, said that the scheme had allowed the country to build “a robust and widely adopted national e-ID ecosystem”.
Though he stressed that “there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to promote digital ID adoption across the globe”.
“Even though we strongly support digital identities being implemented with the highest level of security, privacy, and data protection, they should also carefully balance usability and security. We see that the usability is really a key enabler for the widescale adoption of digital IDs, which should be carefully considered when defining the requirements.”
Commenting on Norway, another country with its own digital ID system, senior adviser and product owner in the identity expert team of the country’s Directorate of Immigration, Raffaele Angius, said that technology was already an established reality in many Nordic states and societies. “It simplifies our daily life all the time,” he said.
Read more: As digital ID adoption grows, government leaders share lessons learned and future plans
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
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