Digital ID: Public Consultation

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

Let me address the first question. This is not a mandatory scheme and, certainly, if people have a digital ID, they can say they do not want it. I do not anticipate any circumstances where a Government would want to take away something that lets people access public services, but I hope the consultation will result in a much more open and transparent debate so that we focus much more on the needs of the public rather than what we think a Government might do.

[Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)]

My Lords, as ever with many big government ideas, there is a solution that is yet to find a problem.

I am yet to hear a ministerial Statement on the very serious data events that happened at Companies House over the last week. I have not heard a Statement from Ministers at the other end, and I do not believe I have heard one in this House.

What happened last week was probably the most serious data breach to hit Companies House in a generation. I am in practice as a chartered accountant, and let me advise the House and the Minister on what happened. If one were logged in to Companies House with one’s personal online registration, one could then find a backdoor route very simply to access any company record in the UK, change directors’ details, find their personal address, file company accounts and file new confirmation statements. This is serious stuff and it is why, me included, we have serious concerns about big government attempts at managing data, because it generally goes wrong. Where a poste restante email address is used, which is very commonplace within practices, those practices are going to have to trawl through all the companies registered with them. Many in the profession are asking: will the Government reimburse the practices which will have to spend many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours making sure that the Companies House foul-up has not affected their clients?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

The noble Lord knows that I cannot possibly answer on his latter point, but I certainly will ensure that he gets a response about it. It is interesting that he was, I think, making the case for what we are proposing. The problem is that different government departments have different portals, different IDs, different ways of getting in and different ways of controlling the data. We want a much more secure digital ID that people will have confidence in. This is not about collecting new data, and it is not a big idea that we will have this central database of everything; this is about how people access public services. At the moment, if you want to get in through Companies House, the noble Lord described something that digital ID may resolve. But other departments have different schemes. Everyone has a story about being locked out of these services because they do not have the right identification or ID, and this is a solution that will help the public. That is what we should be talking about, rather than seeing this as being about big government. It is about delivering public services and not about big government.