Digital ID

Al Pinkerton Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[James McMurdock (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Ind)]

Thank you for saving me until last, Ms Furniss. With Christmas around the corner, the squats from bobbing will come in very handy.

The proposal to introduce digital ID represents one of the most significant changes to the relationship between the individual and the state in modern British history. The measure cannot be taken lightly; nor can it be brushed aside as a simple matter of convenience or administrative efficiency.

Britain already operates with a substantial set of identification systems—birth certificate, passport, driving licence, national insurance number, NHS number and the electoral register—none of which is optional in practice for law-abiding citizens. The Government’s own digital ID webpage confirms that none of those existing documents will be replaced by the new proposal, which creates a logical fallacy: if digital ID is optional and does not replace any of the existing documents, it cannot simplify the existing system.

It is also written in the very first paragraph of the digital ID webpage that the data held on digital ID will be limited to four pieces of information: name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and a photograph. What does that tell us? It tells us that it is not a system really built to simplify domestic life; it is a system built to manage immigration status. Here we have another logical fallacy, because this does nothing to tackle the root cause of the immigration crisis, or anything to strengthen or enforce any of the right-to-work restrictions already in place.

I would add a third logical fallacy, which was somewhat innocently referred to earlier: if digital ID is optional, it can serve no purpose in a “papers, please” scenario. Thankfully, that is probably the better of the two scenarios, despite the cost of nearly £2 billion.

Britain operates on a simple democratic logic: we are born free, and the state may intrude only where necessary, proportionate and agreed by the public. Digital ID risks inverting that principle. I will point out that there was no mandate for this in the Labour manifesto.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman and I represent different political traditions, but I am glad to know that we are bound together by a shared sense of what a liberal society looks like. The only purpose of having an ID of this kind—a mandatory ID—is to enable people to ask for it. When we enable the conditions to be asked to prove our identity in society, we swiftly move from the freedoms he talks about to a permissions-based society, which should concern us all. Does he share that concern?

[James McMurdock]

That is a good point very well made, and it brings me to another point, which has not been raised in this debate: although the Government state that digital ID is optional—at least, at this stage—for the taxpayer, the cost is not optional. If they go ahead with it, we are all paying for it whether we like it or not, and whether we use it or not.

Even if the intentions today are benign, the power created has the potential to long outlive those who introduced it. I am of the view, therefore, that digital ID offers only the potential to inconvenience law-abiding citizens, while also creating the foundations for a powerful new mechanism capable of controlling banking, travel, property ownership, employment, public services, and daily activity into a single, state-managed system. Even if one trusted today’s Government, and many do not, no Government should ever have that level of centralised control over their citizens’ private lives.

The Government’s own website already suggests that digital ID would introduce access to social services, we have mission creep already, whether we like it or not. The digital ID webpage also states that the digital ID will be free. Of course, that is not entirely true, because the cost is £1.8 billion. In addition to the above we have the inevitable security risks and the fact that millions of people will struggle with digital access.

The Government talk liberal, but act authoritarian. Prison sentences for bad language and the proposal to reduce an eight-centuries-old right to jury trials are only two examples of this. Coupled with the digital ID white elephant, it paints an unpretty picture. I am against this measure.