The home affairs select committee has branded the government’s launch of digital ID plans for all British adults last year “nothing short of a fiasco,” saying ministers mishandled the policy from the start. Dame Karen Bradley said the public had been spooked by badly explained plans, even as the government presses ahead with a voluntary app after ditching its mandatory approach.
Sir Keir Starmer first announced in September last year that he wanted compulsory digital ID for workers, but he reversed course three months later after a major public backlash. By January, the mandatory element had been abandoned, and in March the government relaunched the scheme as voluntary, with Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones opening an eight-week consultation and setting up a people’s panel of 100 individuals from across the country.
The proposed app is being developed as a digital identification system stored on smartphones, similar to digital bank cards. It would include residency status, name, date of birth, nationality and a photo, and the information could be used to verify age and the right to live and work in the UK. Ministers initially said a digital Britcard would be mandatory and would help tackle illegal working, but that pitch immediately drew criticism from political opponents and civil liberties campaigners, including Big Brother Watch, over privacy concerns.
The backlash was swift enough to produce a UK Parliament petition against digital IDs that quickly gathered three million signatures. The petition warned that the scheme could lead to “mass surveillance and digital control,” a sign of how far trust in the project had already frayed before the consultation even began.
Bradley said the government was right to introduce digital ID, but argued the launch was botched. She said the announcement had come out of the blue and made little sense to the public, adding that it raised fears of government over-reach into people’s lives and was so poorly thought out that ministers had few answers to calm those concerns. She also said the move away from a mandatory element was welcome, but that consultation should have happened straight away rather than “back to front” after the relaunch.
The government is now trying to rebuild the policy around choice instead of compulsion. Whether that is enough to overcome the anger attached to the original plan is the central test, because the technology may be voluntary, but the memory of how it was introduced is not.
