July 25, 2024 - 7:00am
Digital ID cards sound a bit Big Brother-ish, but the new Labour government has (despite Tony Blair’s best efforts) ruled out introducing mandatory identity passes. By contrast, the Digital Verification Services mentioned in the Kingâs Speech, as part of the Digital Information and Smart Data Bill, sound like a very handy thing in a world where we do so much online. So are civil liberties groups overreacting with cries of Digital ID by the back door?
The proposed digital systems will allow Brits to verify their identity, or key things such as age and citizenship status, with no proposal to require such identification on demand from any state authority. Further, they will be administered by private companies. All the Government will provide is a âDigital Identity and Attributes Trust Frameworkâ to set standards which approved ID â sorry, Digital Verification Service â providers must meet.
Being able to prove who you are, or that you meet certain criteria â being old enough to buy cigarettes, for example â is undoubtedly useful, which is why the providers have been pushing for this framework to enable them to expand into a lucrative market. What would turn that convenience into a âPapers, pleaseâ society would be expanding the scope of state powers to require that we prove our identities on demand.
Unfortunately, once such digital ID systems become widely used, mission creep is difficult to prevent. Even if the state does not directly start demanding papers, the impossibility of renting a home, starting a job, or opening a bank account without recognised digital ID will make it impossible to function without one.
More worrying, though, is the proposal to link together all our records within Government systems into one unified record. Civil servants, exasperated by the plethora of databases and portals through which we interact with state systems and services, have long pushed for a single administrative identity for each citizen. Sweden is among several countries to assign each person a number that follows them from school to doctor to tax office, and itâs easy to see why UK officials look with envy at the ease of linking the different dimensions of our relationship with the state. The UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) account already effectively functions as a digital ID to allow non-UK-citizens to prove their right to work or rent a home, and can also be accessed by the DWP, HMRC, DVLA and NHS. No such system yet exists for UK citizens.
There are good reasons to resist this move, however easy it would make the lives of well-meaning bureaucrats. That ease is not a sufficient reason to make a change with so many pitfalls. The most obvious is that the more unified the database, the more attractive â and potentially vulnerable â it becomes to hackers.
Mission creep, again, is a real risk. As Internet Law expert Paul Bernal points out, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, supposedly targeting organised crime and terrorism, was then used to investigate dog mess and parents trying to get their kids into non-local schools.
Pupil nationality data, ostensibly collected to assess the impact of immigration on education, was shared with the Home Office and used to target the children of illegal immigrants. The outcry that led to that repurposing of data about schoolchildren was a reminder that the relationship of trust underlying our willingness to share data with authorities is not homogenous.
Some Brits may, for example, trust schools or the NHS with their data â either because of their competence or because they perceive their use of it as benefitting society â more than they trust the Home Office or DWP. Linking all official data sources together risks reducing that trust to a lowest common denominator. This happened in 1991 when the census was â wrongly â suspected of being used as a register for the new, unpopular Poll Tax. Around a million people did not appear on that yearâs census, rendering it much less reliable as a data source.
A plurality of official digital identities may make life harder for civil servants â and for us, when accessing Government services. A little friction slows down everyday transactions, but it also does wonders to protect us from a slippery slope towards needless surveillance.
Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.
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SubscribeAbout six months ago I tried to log in to the NHS and was presented with a demand to submit an ID and a VIDEO of my face. Using the NHS to build their live facial recognition database ??
Last week I got an email telling me that unless I submitted ID within 13 months my login would be removed.
This is how it happens. Nothing will be mandated by the government, but your life will be made progressively more difficult until you are excluded from society.
Facial recognition databases are important for public safety. Furthermore an immigrant whose face was not on tne database could be excluded from access to taxpayer funded services as could anyone with a criminal or civil sanction.
… said Xi Jinping.
Hahaaaa! Good one.
Itâs a shame that the author omitted to mention that ID cards help to shrink the âblack economyâ resulting in more tax funding to pay for government spending.
Quite.
This could both lower government spending (by reducing fraudulent claims – and that’s massive) and by improving tax collection yields.
It’s no good people on here whining on about illegal immigration if you then turn round and refuse to provide information systems that allow you to actually detect it and do something about it. If nothing else, we’d finally get a far more accurate estimate of what the actual UK population is and just what proportion of it is due to illegal immigration. It’s hard to take good decisions without such data.
I don’t like compulsory IDs either and my gut instinct is usually to distrust anyone in authority. But the world’s going digital whether we like it or not. We’re simply arguing about the eventual implementation at this point – whether it’s done competently and what accountability and regulation there should be. Yes, the UK government and civil service’s form over the past few decades gives me no confidence here. But there have been times in our history – and there are countries implementing such systems – that show that it’s possible if done properly.
Sure. There is no black economy in European countries with compulsory ID cards. No crime. No illegal immigration. No paying cash in hand. And the lack of legitimate ID documents is never used to trap someone in sweatshop work since they can’t get benefits, being non-people…
As with many seemingly good theories, practical reality entwines and strangles good intentions.
Yes but we have huge amounts of fraud in this country. The estimated bill for welfare fraud runs in to billions and every where you look now there are vape shops, Turkish barbers, Indian restaurants and taxi operations that are just money laundering operations not to mention the legions of deliver drivers.
Why do you think they pay thousands to people smuggler to get them across the channel, because they have always loved this country from afar and want to be British. No it is the free stuff and the opportunity to disappear and scam
Of course you canât eliminate these things – but you can âshrinkâ them.
ID cards are compulsory in Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain.
From estimates of the size of the shadow economy 2022 as % of GDP only Luxembourg (8.3%) has a smaller shadow economy than the UK (10.6%). The rest all have a larger shadow sector, some by significant amounts eg Spain is 15.8%. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Size-of-the-shadow-economy-of-31-European-countries-in-2022-in-of-off-GDP-Source_fig3_361775720
More important for shrinking a shadow economy is developing a high-trust society where citizens feel governments are working for them, not against them – where people are treated as citizens, not subjects. If the law is ‘our’ law then there is more of a sense of community outrage against other people breaking ‘our’ law or ‘our’ norms – something that can be as trivial as not dropping litter or, (from current news), not hitting animals, and wanting to contribute and pay taxes.
My point is that the shadow economy in any given country would be larger without ID cards – than with ID cards. Your comment does not address this at all. What we will probably never see is what happens in countries where ID cards are removed.
Your âour lawâ stuff is correct- but part of a different point.
Having lived in Spain for 30 years on and off, I am completely comfortable with the idea of ID cards.
You cannot do ANYTHING in Spain without proving your ID-
Check in a hotel
Claim any benefits
See a Doctor
Order goods from large retailers
Buy car parts
Book an MOT
Etc
Etc
Sure, there are risks.
But given the horrendous situation we find ourselves in, with 10 million âillegals â living in and benefiting from our society, then I feel it is the only way.
You are assuming that an ID card system is introduced which aims to centralize every piece of information on a person. I would not support centralizing all tax, financial and other information about a person. I think for one thing that the card should be just that a card, so that you are aware just by looking at it that all the info is correct.
For me it would be compulsory for everyone present in the country to be registered and hold an ID card – irrespective of whether they are citizens, non-citizens or irregular arrivals. It would have to be shown for all interactions with state authorities, when taking a job or using the NHS. It would state all the normal personal information, ones citizenship and the status under which one is present in the country. One might even be required to be updated at the office which deals with council tax if done locally or if done nationally the DVLA might issue them. One would be expected to renew it every time one moved.
Of course it doesn’t stop any of these things. But it makes life smarter for ordinary people.
Iâm not sure why services should be provided to anonymous people ?
The UK relied on basic honesty for generations with access to services and money.
If you wanted the dole you stood in front of a person and looked them in the eye. If you wanted medical care you provided names, address and date of birth, again, standing in front of a “real person”.
This system is no longer fit for purpose. With access to all sorts of services being totally online it is far too easy for those so inclined to milk the system. I expect many of us know people milking the system for personal benefit that costs the more honest population a lot of money. (I know some, both personal and by hearsay).
Is a mandatory ID card the answer to avoid fraud? I don’t know but it would be a step in the right direction.
I struggle with the idea of these being provided by commercial services but i also have little faith ion the Public Sector being able to manage a universal system.
I think the UK will have a mandatory ID card system sometime and not too far away.
China has a system for sale if it helps.
Case in point – the recent benefits scam conducted by a Romanian couple who illegally obtained over ÂŁ50 million .. let that sink in a moment, over ÂŁ50 million! By applying for and getting numerous benefits for themselves and for a whole village in Romania, many of whom had never set foot in the UK.. All done by applying on line without any face to face interviews.. My partner who has recently completed 30 years in the DWP, many of those years as a fraud investigator is not at all surprised at this, she advises that this just the proverbial tip of a lump of sea ice ….
A digital ID is effic and databases can be made sufficiently hack proof. We are also facing internal strife from disaffected parts of society who will need to be monitored. Fortunately civil liberties fanatics are unpopular and politically irrelevant.
It comes down to the percentage of criminal behaviour in a society. If it’s very small, you don’t need ID cards. If it’s big, they are a way of containing the untaxed grey ‘economy’. The 21st century requires ID cards.
I would have thought using IDs to work out which children should not be in tax funded schools was a feature not a bug. And not treating using tax funded hospitals people who arenât supposed to be here.
Am I way off here?
UK citizens are subject to some of the most comprehensive and sophisticated surveillance systems in the world. Their apparent naivety about this when objecting to ID cards is genuinely charming, reminiscent of The Truman Show.
Why would you get that worried when Amazon and various Bank card companies know more about you than you do yourself!
France has ID requirement – all persons must possess some form of valid government-issued identity documentation. We don’t require similar and it is but one additional reason we might be helping the people smugglers with their marketing pitch.
I remember similar concerns widely expressed over CCTV in the UK in the late 80”s, early 90’s- hysterical/paranoid in retrospect. The Big Brother nightmare never happened, the environment became safer.
Demands to reduce illegal immmigration, because it makes us feel uncomfortable, refusal to use necessary means (ID cards) because they make us feel uncomfortable – the luxury beliefs of populism inaction.
Oh, and it’s actually a rather simple problem for which ‘the others’ are to blame – for causing it, and for the failure, nay refusal, to rectify it. Wouldn’t have happened in my day/ on my watch. Luxury.
I donât like the idea of ID cards and fully understand the âpapers pleaseâ objections.
**But** would they help fix the catastrophic immigration problem? The possibility thereâs 10 million more people in the U.K. (according to supermarkets) than claimed in the census? The enormous grey economy in this country is a huge problem, could this be the solution? Genuine question.
Yes. I don’t dismiss the concerns expressed in the article, but there does seem to be a trade-off that it much easier for people to work illegally in the UK. Given the issues now associated with mass immigration, which appear to be getting worse all the time, introducing a digital verification that you are legal to work seems like something where the pro’s outweigh the con’s.
I feared the original National ID card because of ‘mission creep’ and the almost certain demands from police for ‘your papers please’ whenever they felt like it.
I believe the risks of mission creep are even greater under Keir (not really Tony Blair) Starmer’s Labour and their drive to a glorious utopia (sarcasm). And there’s a recent example of how an IT system can fail disasterously.
If you thought ‘de-banking’ was terrible, how about ‘de-IDing’?
From a country where we have lived with ID cards for many years it’s difficult how a modern society can exist without. Nearly all our connections with the State, Municipiality, Hospitals and Banks to mention the main areas are connected with our Id card which origin was a social security card to be used in Hospitals. Today I have used it 5 times,1) to order a blood test at the hospital 2) to order transport to the Hospital 3) at the contact at the hospital 4) to do a money transfer via my bank and 5) when I looked in the Heath care journal system to se the result of my test.
It doesn’t help 100% with the immigration. Ask Sweden why.
I support the introduction of a robust internal security system with compulsory ID cards and fingerprints, like just about everyone I know irrespective of whether they are basically left or right, whether they supported Brexit or were against it. Literally everyone I know. I find the opposition to it amongst the elites in our society quite baffling given that the same people seem to be of the view that one simply can’t have enough CCTV cameras, both everywhere within urban areas and even in rural areas. In many parts of the country travelling between one town and another one is at all points within range of one. Although it is generally stated that only China and Russia have more public surveillance systems I doubt this because I assume their systems are located only within urban areas. Yet in Britain absolutely no-one seems to object to it. Literally no-one.