Labour’s Digital ID Scheme is a Dystopian Experiment in Mass Surveillance

For a liberal democracy with an educated population, we’re in a curious position: everybody is talking about something nobody knows anything about! I’m referring to digital ID and the fact the Government hasn’t put its plans in writing. As a result, most of the discussion is highly speculative: a mixture of hopes – ‘it’s nothing to worry about’ – and fears – ‘it’s a digital prison’.

Yet the digital ID consultation, which runs until May 5th, contains significant pieces of information which, along with insights from experts giving evidence to the Home Affairs Parliamentary Committee, forms a clear picture of the Government’s intentions. So, in an attempt to alleviate some of the national ignorance, I’ve collated them below.

The first thing to understand is that the Government plans to create a centralised system by which UK citizens verify their identity and access public services. This doesn’t mean creating a huge database from scratch but using the existing Government platform One Login and making it interoperable so that data can be shared across different departments and bodies. So when John Brown signs up to One Login, his details would cross-populate to all linked organisations, which would include private and third sector providers. Depending on how the system was constructed, staff in those bodies would have access to that information. This is what lies behind the oft-repeated claims that digital ID will be ‘convenient’, enabling citizens to use a single sign-in to access all the services they need, and a second claim that it will cut down on cost and bureaucracy. The controversial ‘card’, to be hosted on the GOV.UK.app, would just be the front end of this system.

From this follows a number of important facts.

The digital ID system would build a comprehensive, ongoing record of citizens’ activities, potentially functioning as an audit and tracking system. This was the conclusion of Professor Edgar Whitley, an academic who has advised the Government on One Login. He told the Parliamentary committee that documents he’d seen in the Home Office suggested Government envisaged a system which kept an audit trail rather than one which simply conducted verification checks. The audit trail might start with right-to-work checks (the stated purpose of the system) but could later be extended to other areas such as health, creating a record-keeping and auditing system that could be used for other purposes. Labour Together’s BritCard report, he went on, had also proposed a system which would “allow the Home Office to build a canonical record of where and when checks have been successfully completed”.

Meanwhile, the digital ID consultation contains a proposal for the creation of a “Government checker service” to be used every time someone used their digital ID: “Unlike with physical documents, information on the digital ID should not be relied upon without being checked through technological means,” the guidance explains. “This is because ‘visual inspection’ (i.e., where a person simply shows their digital ID on their device’s screen to a relying party) could allow someone to show a faked or edited screen that human eyes cannot detect. Instead, the digital ID will need to undergo a technical check, via a process called ‘programmatic verification,’ whenever it is presented.”

In other words, a state system would act as mediator for all transactions and activities needing verification. It would no longer be enough for another human to examine your driving licence or passport in order to sell you a product or provide a service. Over time, a comprehensive picture of John’s movements and activities extending way beyond his tax or employment records would emerge. Every time used his digital ID to hire a car or confirm he was old enough to buy alcohol, it would be logged on the Government system.

The consultation contains this graphic which indicates the Government’s current thinking on how digital ID could be used:

It follows from this that digital ID could easily function as a permissions system. The computer might say No, leaving John unable to hire the car or buy the wine. That could be the result of an administrative error or technical glitch but, by the time the issue was resolved, John’s plans would have been cancelled. But it could also be due to the cancellation of his digital ID, a possibility the Government makes explicit in the consultation, explaining it would need the power to revoke someone’s digital ID.

Speaking at the Parliamentary committee, insider-outsider Whitley said that the system envisaged for the right-to-work checks was one in which permissions for other activities, such as buying alcohol, could be switched off and on at will.

The consultation also reveals that the system will contain a lot of personal information.

The government says the core information about an individual will include a person’s name, date of birth, nationality and a photo. It adds it does not plan to include address “initially” but may decide to do so in future. So the first point to note is that, once the system is in place, the information held about you could easily be expanded – and would have to be if the functions of digital ID expanded.

The photo, we are told, must be biometric. That’s an important detail. Big Brother Watch Director Silkie Carlo told the Parliamentary committee: “What we know about the proposed digital ID system is that it will basically be a massive facial recognition system, because it would be linked to facial biometrics. That’s one of the only substantive things we have been told about the Government proposal.”

This tallies with a clause in the consultation which states there is a “legal basis for police use of facial recognition” and that the Government is currently “reviewing the legal framework for using facial recognition in law enforcement”. Conveniently, the High Court has just ruled that the police’s use of facial recognition is lawful.

The Government says it is “exploring whether people should be legally required to inform the Government within a suitable timeframe of any errors or changes to personal information held in their digital ID, so that it can be updated” and what “an appropriate form of enforcement” would be. So our John could be getting a fine every time he fails to update the authorities with whatever information they decide to include.

In order for it to work, a digital ID system would cost untold amounts of public money.

The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the cost of digital ID over the next three years would be £1.8 billion.

This seems conservative in the light of the fact that the last time the Government tried to introduce identity cards, the London School of Economics put the cost at £18 billion – three times the Government’s own estimate. And that was back in 2005.

The UK Government has form in IT projects which spiral out of control. The attempt to create an integrated patient record system for the NHS began in 2002 with an initial budget of £6.2 billion. By the time the project was abandoned a decade later amid technical failures and legal disputes, the cost approached £13 billion.

The consultation reveals an aspect of the Government’s plans which make the real costs impossible to estimate. The section on “digital inclusion” acknowledges that a significant proportion of the population lacks the means to use digital ID. The Government estimates that four million people don’t have the necessary digital skills. This may be an underestimate: the digital inclusion charity Good Things Foundation estimates that almost eight million people in the UK – the population of several small countries – lack basic digital skills. The consultation lists 24 groups who would require “targeted support” in order to be able to use digital ID. They range from those on low incomes and people using “outdated” technology to the “neurodivergent” and people with privacy concerns or distrustful of the authorities. The Government stresses the list is “non-exhaustive” and asks respondents if they can think of any other groups who would struggle with digital ID.

By way of solution, the Government proposes a raft of vaguely-worded measures including “dedicated and locally accessible help”, “support and training from trusted individuals” and “guidance and programmes designed to inform and  disseminate  skills”. The public are asked whether they have any other ideas. There is mention of “alternative routes” to the same digital destination: imagine consoles in public places for those without devices and community sessions with volunteers helping people to conduct their business online. What could possibly go wrong?

Significantly, there is no mention of the obligation to provide non-digital alternatives, such as the paper tax form I still file to HMRC. Under the Equalities Act 2010, public bodies and service providers have a legal obligation to anticipate barriers that digital systems might pose to the disabled and provide genuine alternatives such as phone calls and face-to-face meetings.

This part of the consultation lays bare an important truth about the Government’s plans. Ultimately, everyone is to be brought into the digital net. There is no reason or set of circumstances under which Citizen John would not have digital ID, his activities authorised by the Government Checker and a canonical record of his history and habits built over time. Essentially, the consultation outlines a vision of a vast state-sponsored digital education programme with all kinds of people involved in the national effort to Make Britain Digital.

There are no figures for the likely cost of this but the phrase that occurs is ‘bottomless pit’.

The Government’s digital ID plan cannot be costed because it is an experiment. Even Director of Government Innovation and Policy at the Tony Blair Institute Alexander Iosad admits this, telling the Parliamentary committee: “I do not think any country has built a system that operates in the way that we think the technology can do.”

So what is the basis of these repeated assertions from ministers and advocates that the UK is ‘falling behind’ other countries because it doesn’t have digital ID? It sounds very much as if confusion is being sown between countries with systems that focus on verification and the grand plans of the UK government for a tracking and permissions system. A couple of countries have developed comprehensive digital ID systems: Estonia and India, cited by Starmer and Co as examples to emulate. But India’s system for a population approaching 1.5 billion – see the piece I wrote about Aadhaar for Together – offers many cautionary tales. While technically voluntary, it’s become almost impossible to get things done without signing up and giving your fingerprints in exchange for your unique identifier. Since the system was set up in 2009, the biometrics have failed, lives have been lost and money has ended up in the wrong bank accounts.

Meanwhile, Estonia with its population of 1.3 million, has simpler data management needs. The country’s mandatory e-ID system uses a federated rather than a centralised model which limits access to citizen data by Government officials and other parties. Every log into the system is visible to the data owner and those making unnecessary checks can be prosecuted. But even this small, carefully constructed system has had multiple data breaches and was used as the basis for the speedy introduction of vaccine passports under Covid.

Whatever UK Ministers say now, digital ID would not be voluntary in any meaningful sense. Whiteley told the committee: “The current proposal is that any time you want to take on a job, with a new contract of employment, you will have to have a digital ID. … There were reports saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be voluntary’ — until you have to change a job, which means that everybody is going to have to have it.”

In the face of the public backlash, the Government has subsequently declared digital ID would not be mandatory after all. But it went on to say that compulsory right-to-work checks using documents such as biometric passports will move fully online by 2029. If I’m not mistaken, those checks will take place via One Login.

“When I use a word,” says Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Another giveaway lies in the consultation proposal to issue children with a single unique identifier. Giving children digital ID from birth only makes sense if the ultimate goal is for it to become a de facto requirement for access for public services. And since a parent or carer would make the decision to sign the child up, the data owner would never have given any real consent.

More broadly, many are sceptical about the genuineness of the consultation. In recent years we’ve seen all sorts of new and unpalatable measures introduced without any real democratic process or after consultations in which the public have clearly said no. The inclusion of a “People’s Panel for digital ID” in the consultation process strongly has the hallmarks of manufacturing consent – getting people in a room, encouraging them to give the ‘right’ answers to loaded questions and then publicising their answers in the national media.

And I can’t forget the efforts of Peter Prinsley MP in the Parliamentary committee. Referring to the many submissions opposing digital ID the committee had received, he asked both panels of experts how the public could be persuaded to accept it. How could digital ID be “sold” to them? How could people be “made” to see the advantages?

That’s the kind of technocratic manage-the-population mindset which could lead us into a very dark place indeed.

This is the first in a three-part series looking at Digital Dystopia vs Digital Rights and was first published on Alex Klaushofer’s Substack Ways of Seeing.