NO 2 Digital ID?
In September 2025, the Prime Minister announced plans to launch a Digital ID scheme that will be mandatory for Right to Work checks in the UK.
In this digital age, data about who we are, what we do, and where we’ve been is stored by almost every organisation, public or private, that we interact with. Supporters of digital ID argue that a national Digital ID scheme would allow data held by the government to be accessed more easily.
Such a radical rethink in how the State handles our personal data, though, raises some significant concerns which have yet to be addressed. This blog outlines the most prominent of those concerns, as expressed by members of Unlock Democracy in a recent survey.
Digital ID won’t work
The Government is framing this policy around one, big idea: Digital ID will help Britain take back control of its borders. In their own words, ‘[Digital ID] will stop those with no right to be here from being able to find work, curbing their prospect of earning money, one of the key “pull factors” for people who come to the UK illegally.’
But if existing Right to Work checks are not stopping people from cheating the system, how would a Digital ID be different? As former Home Office official David Rennie told the BBC, “It's the black economy - by its nature, [employers] are not performing right to work checks”. Many countries with Digital ID schemes in place still struggle to prevent illegal working practices.
The Government has also said that Digital ID could be used to streamline interactions with the State, reducing the bureaucratic burden on citizens. The model here is the “Once Only” principle used in Estonia. This means that a citizen should only have to provide a given piece of information to the government once, saving them having to repeatedly supply the same information to different government departments.
The British State is much larger and more complex than Estonia, though. The State of Digital Government report, published in January 2025, found the UK government’s digital infrastructure in a poor condition with many services still relying on analogue methods. Plans to leverage government data to make voter registration more efficient, announced in the recent Elections Strategy, foresaw many obstacles and concerns around privacy. If introducing a simple system of Automatic Voter Registration is so difficult, why does the Government think it can introduce a full Digital ID scheme before 2029?
2. Digital ID raises concerns around privacy and civil liberties
Any mandatory Digital ID scheme (including a pseudo-voluntary scheme, where participation is the price of entry to society) would fundamentally transform the relationship between the State and the individual.
First of all, a more centralised or interconnected approach to government data creates an infrastructure for mass surveillance, making it easier for the State to track the activity of citizens across different services and sectors. Even if the intentions of the current government are benign, such a system is open to abuse by any future government.
The threat of “mission creep” also looms. The Government initially announced the Digital ID scheme as a way to crack down on immigration, and then quickly expanded its framing to stress the efficiency benefits for ordinary citizens. This kind of mission creep is common with Digital ID schemes, for example in Singapore, where the “Singpass” started as a single-sign in scheme for State services and now covers interactions with hundreds of public and private services.
As well as encroaching on our privacy, Digital ID can also leave vulnerable people excluded from basic services. The more areas of life these schemes touch, the more severe the consequences of exclusion. In India, problems with the Aadhaar ID scheme have led to vulnerable people being blocked from accessing essential services, like food and education. Here in the UK, memories of the botched rollout of Universal Credit do not inspire confidence that a similar outcome could be avoided here.
The Aadhaar ID is also a case study of how Digital ID schemes can be vulnerable to data breaches, both malicious and accidental. Aadhaar IDs have been sold on the Dark Web, along with other identifying information about people resident in India. Even Estonia, the poster child for progressive Digital ID schemes, has experienced some serious issues around its ability to keep citizens’ data safe.
3. No one voted for this
So, Digital ID will bring significant privacy risk, all while failing to address the problem it is being introduced to solve. This is bad enough, but worse still is the fact that this policy is being imposed without a democratic mandate.
Digital ID did not appear in Labour’s 2024 manifesto. There was no debate during the election campaign on digital ID, and the public were not able to take it into account when deciding who to vote for. The policy was then announced unilaterally, without consultation, over a year after the election.
If there had been a debate on Digital ID during the last General Election campaign, we may have been able to reach some form of consent and consensus. As things stand, after Starmer’s announcement in September 2025, net support for Digital ID fell from +35% to -14%.
What now?
Unlock Democracy campaigned successfully against ID cards 20 years ago. A lot has changed since then, not least the amount of personal data we now habitually share in exchange for services. It is conceivable that some form of Digital ID scheme could be implemented in a way that respects privacy, freedom, and civil liberties. Such a scheme would have to be genuinely voluntary, offer citizens full transparency and control over what data is shared and who accesses it, and be designed with the highest level of security. Most importantly, it must be developed with the full cooperation and consent of British citizens.
The Government’s proposals in their current form fall way short of the mark, and so Unlock Democracy will continue to oppose them.