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The UK Government has gone out to consultation on a proposed national digital ID system, described by the Cabinet Office as ‘vital public infrastructure for the digital age’.
The consultation runs to May 5. A document introducing the consultation likens the proposed ID to what’s used in the private sector for online banking; and says it will expand government systems ‘which are already successfully proving and verifying peopleโs identities’.
Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, in a foreword to a document, ‘ย Making public services work for you with your digital identity‘, said digital ID would ‘help transform public services’. As for security of identities, the document said that UK government digital services and technical infrastructure must comply with two core standards โ Cyber Assessment Framework profiles and Secure by Design principles. The document acknowledged cyber threats as a ‘growing risk to the resilience of public services, with a sharp rise in sophisticated attacks targeting critical systems’.
As for a comparison of digital ID with the last Labour Government’s physical ID card scheme of the 2000s – soon cancelled by the Coalition Government replacing it in 2010 – the document states that theer’ll be no legal obligation for people to have or present the digital ID; and the police will not have new powers to request someoneโs digital ID for ‘stop and search’ purposes.
Core
A digital ID would contain ‘core information about a person’, according to the consultation: name, date of birth, nationality (relevant for someone’s ‘right to work’ in the UK); and a ‘high-resolution biometric facial image’.
Comment
At the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, Senior Legal and Policy Officer Jasleen Chaggar said: โA national digital ID isย a multi-billion pound scheme thatย no-one voted forย and that itโs quite possible no-one will use.ย The government could make accessing services easier without building an app that creates a comprehensiveย logbook of our lives.ย Almost three million people have already made it clear that they do not want a digital ID in one of the biggest petitions in British history and politicians across all parties opposed the mandatory scheme. A citizenโs assembly should not be used to manufacture legitimacyย for the governmentโs highly unpopular preordained agenda.ย Even the Cabinet is split on digital ID, with ministers reportedly refusing to hand over our NHS records and our childrenโs education files for the digital ID scheme. What confidence can the public have to hand over their private information when the risks to their privacy and security are so high? Given the public backlash, high costs, serious data risks and likelihood that this could become a mandatory scheme in practice,ย the government should drop this digital ID disaster altogether.โ
Facial recognition
A separate consultation (which concluded in February 2026) was reviewing the legal framework for police use of facial recognition, a framework that the digital ID consultation described as ‘complicated’. Big Brother Watch complained that the consultation included an admission that the police would be allowed to repurpose digital ID photos as mugshotsย to create a population-wide facial recognition database. Jasleen Chaggar added: “It isย forย precisely thisย reason that the public is rightly sceptical of a sprawling ID system that has been sold to usย under various guises โ whether to โstop the boatsโ or improve public services โ but which invariablyย handsย more power and more of our personal information to the state, at our expense.โ
Photo by Mark Rowe: Shrewsbury town centre, anti-ID protester, autumn 2025.
