Is it time the UK introduced mandatory ID?

Labour is exploring the idea of introducing digital ID cards in the UK as a means of cracking down on illegal immigration and welfare fraud.

Two decades after Tony Blair first proposed the idea, Labour Together, a think tank closely aligned with the government, has put forward plans for a 'BritCard': a "mandatory national digital identity that would be issued free of charge to all those with the right to live or work in the UK, whether they are British-born nationals or legal migrants".

Held on a smartphone, the card would be linked to government records and could be checked by employers or landlords. Eventually serving as a one-stop shop for a range of government services such as claiming benefits or ordering passports, it would see "the citizen taking back control of their own data and public services", Rother Valley MP Jake Richards said.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What did the commentators say?

Britain and Ireland are the only European countries without an ID card system, and that "critics argue has made it attractive to migrants as it is easier to live and work illegally", said The Times.

Four-fifths of the public support the use of ID cards to check an individual's right to work, which is why a large number of Labour MPs in the Red Wall believe "the policy will help counter Reform in their areas".

"Few issues in Britain provoke as much controversy as a national identity system", said the Financial Times in December last year. Opponents on both the left and the right have long denounced mandatory ID cards as the first step towards a dystopian surveillance state that ends the individual's right to privacy and tramples civil liberties. But this view is met with "puzzlement" elsewhere in Europe.

"Times and public attitudes have changed", said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, as have "the political imperatives". With successive governments failing to "stop the boats", ID cards would be "a second line of defence against undocumented migrants who would find getting a job, renting a flat or using public services near impossible without one".

This, though, is a "self-sabotaging view", said The Critic. It holds that "traditional liberties" were only ever agreeable within a "homogenous, high-trust community" and are now a "luxury we can no longer afford in an era of enormous immigration from very different cultures".

In truth, this gives access to a further "erosion of privacy with a promise of safety, which is seldom if ever delivered upon".

What next?

"Number 10 appears to be using the Labour Together paper to 'kite-fly' the proposal before deciding whether to pursue it", said The Times, with the possibility of "rolling out a voluntary scheme that could become mandatory at a future date".

Labour Together has estimated the BritCard system would cost up to £400 million to build and around £10 million a year to administer as a free-to-use app.

But it could boost public finances by around £2 billion a year by reducing benefits fraud, improving tax collection and better targeting of support during crises, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change said in a report last year.

Digital ID reflects the reality we now live in, said Toynbee. In a world where AI and algorithms "will find you, assessing your age and address from a host of databases", it makes sense to "control everything from one government-run base".

Yet it is exactly this kind of "unthinking deflection" that sees civil liberty campaigners "put their heads in their hands", said The Spectator. "Privacy became a basic right in modern democracies for a reason: why are policy people proposing to casually abandon a core principle?" And that's without getting into the risks of uploading vast amounts of personal information on "a leaky centralised system".