Mandatory Digital ID

Adnan Hussain Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Digital Government and Data (Ian Murray)]

It is, as always, a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) for his speech. It was a very good speech, but suffered from the big disadvantage of none of it being actually accurate in terms of what the policy is and what digital ID is supposed to be about.

Let me start by saying—I mean this seriously and I mean it passionately in my defence of Parliament and Government—that it is okay to debate these things. There is a huge number of people in Westminster Hall today who want to debate this subject. An hour may not be enough, and no doubt we will come back to these issues on several occasions. But there is something that is really important. There is a real task for us all to do as custodians of democracy, which is to have this debate from the perspective of the facts that are out there and not to peddle myths.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) said clearly in an intervention that all we have heard is the myths. I hope I can bust some of those myths to give comfort to some of our constituents that this scheme is not what is being portrayed by the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire and what we have heard in many of the contributions. We have a real responsibility to make sure that we have proper debates—with the facts, not with what we read on social media.

[Mr Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) (Ind)]

The Minister says that we are “custodians of democracy”. On the back of that, and in the light of his comments, I ask this: will the Government commit to a direct vote in the House, a free vote on the digital ID scheme before it is rolled out and becomes mandatory in any form? The public and their elected representatives deserve clarity and choice.

[Ian Murray]

A full consultation will be launched by the end of this year. There are two options that the Government could have taken. We could have started from the position of a fully fledged programme, a fully fledged policy, and then taken that out to consultation; or we could take the approach that we are doing at the moment, which is to go out to consultation after we have had some initial consultation with people, so that the formal consultation is shaped by people’s views and the concerns that they raise.

I will give two examples, which are from the island of Ireland and from Northern Ireland and in terms of the common travel area and the Good Friday agreement. These are things that have to be resolved. We now know they are big issues, and that will go into the consultation to try to resolve them. We cannot have it both ways. We have chosen to take this particular approach in order to develop a consultation—