A national digital ID could hand the government the tools for population-wide surveillance – and if history is anything to go by, ministers probably couldn’t run it without cocking it up.
That’s the warning from Big Brother Watch in its new “Checkpoint Britain” report, published just days after Keir Starmer confirmed the government is considering a national digital identity scheme to tackle illegal immigration.
The civil liberties group says the government’s argument that digital ID will meaningfully reduce illegal immigration or employment fraud is poorly substantiated and warns that touting digital ID as a political fix for migration problems is misleading. It argues that ministers have also been far too vague about the plan’s scope, which it says could easily extend beyond right-to-work and right-to-rent checks to cover “online banking, booking a train ticket, shopping on Amazon, or scheduling a GP appointment.”
The result would be a “checkpoint society” where identity checks become an unavoidable part of daily life, Big Brother Watch says.
The group says such a system would fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state, creating a surveillance infrastructure vulnerable to abuse, discrimination, and hacking. A Big Brother Watch poll, carried out by YouGov, shows that 63 percent of Brits don’t trust the government to protect their data – hardly surprising given Whitehall’s track record of bungled IT projects, data leaks, and multi-billion-pound write-offs.
The group has also sounded the alarm over the UK’s existing digital identification system, One Login, which underpins the credential issuing process in the so-called “BritCard” proposal, which it says is known to suffer from substantial cybersecurity and data protection weaknesses.
Big Brother Watch also warns of mission creep, arguing that once a system is live, “voluntary” quickly becomes mandatory. Those who fail or refuse to enrol risk being locked out of jobs, housing, or healthcare, while errors could leave people wrongly excluded from essential services.
“The notion that digital ID will provide a magic-bullet solution for unauthorised immigration is ludicrous,” said Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch. “It will not stop small boat crossings, and it will not deter those intent on using non-legal means of entering the country from doing so. But digital ID will create a huge burden for the largely law-abiding 60 million people who already live here and insert the state into many aspects of our everyday lives.”
This battle is just the latest in Britain’s long-running digital ID soap opera. Labour attempted to bring in ID cards in the 2000s, only for the scheme to be scrapped and the database deleted by the coalition government in 2010. Since then, successive governments have revisited the idea, touting smoother public services and fraud prevention, but critics say convenience often comes at the expense of privacy and security.
The Checkpoint Britain report ups the pressure on Starmer’s government as it decides whether to press ahead. The group’s message is blunt: unless ministers can guarantee strict limits and iron-clad safeguards, a national digital ID risks becoming a tool for mass surveillance – and one the government can’t be trusted to run. ®