How do you launch a multi-million pound UK Government IT project? Without properly scoping the cost or the potential savings, of course!

The UK Government has fleshed out its plans for digital IDs and opened a consultation prior to, in theory, legislation on the subject. Whether those plans do anything to calm the debate around such technology seems...well, unlikely.

Last year UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was in full blood-and-thunder, ‘something must be done’ mode as he confirmed that his administration not only planned to introduce digital IDs but that these would become compulsory for everyone in Britain. 

This was dressed up under the ‘stop the small boats’ anti-illegal immigration push back against Nigel Farage and his band of followers at Reform, as Starmer puffed himself up to declare:

 You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID.

But in what has become typical Starmer-style, there was a public outcry accompanied by lots of bad headlines in the right wing media, so a policy 'reverse-ferret' was performed, the umpteenth in less than two years in office. This means digital ID will no longer be mandatory for proving Right to Work by 2029 as originally planned.

What for?

As currently conceived, digital IDs would hold full name, date of birth, nationality, a high-resolution facial image, a unique number, and in some cases other data such as whether the person has an authorized representative.

It will be based on two government-built systems - Gov.uk One Login and Gov.uk Wallet. One Login, is a single account for accessing public services online, which more than 12 million people have already signed up to. Gov.UK Wallet is not yet available, but is intended to allow citizens to store their digital ID on their smartphones.

The first use case will still be pitched as to carry out digital right-to-work checks, but it will not be compulsory, with workers able to show other forms of ID as proof such as passport scans. Future use cases are envisioned to take in areas such as childcare, national insurance, tax, registering marriages/births/deaths etc. 

 
And some of the arguments again seem to be endearingly British in their pitched appeal  to the national consciousness. Just as Starmer cited reporting potholes in the road - a UK obsession - as a core benefit of a government AI push, a big deal with digital ID will apparently be people being able to receive alerts based on their address telling them when their bins are going to be emptied. The fact that such notifications are entirely possible today without the need to build a massive national database of the population will doubtless not go unchallenged by critics...

Easier and cheaper...how?

But the main thrust of the Government’s latest push is being built around making it easier for citizens to engage with government as well as cutting the cost of public service delivery, which, of course, is funded by the taxpayer. Buy into our digital ID idea and we might be able to cut your taxes...

Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones was the politician sent out to make the case to win public buy-in for the planned scheme, talking about the idea of “government-by-app” which will, he claimed, make UK lives easier:  

People too often dread their interactions with public services. Endless telephone calls, complicated printed forms and having to tell your story multiple times to different parts of government. I want to change that and make public services work for you. The new digital ID will make that possible, allowing you to log on and prove who you are to access public services more quickly, easily and securely.

But on the cost-cutting side of the argument he was left floundering, forced to admit that how much all of this will cost to set up has not been worked out, so any guesses about how much money might be saved are purely that - finger in the air guesses. The 91 page consultation document slips in a ‘cover my ass’ caveat on page 83 that:

At this stage of development, it is not possible to definitively estimate the cost to government from developing and running the digital ID system.

Jones had to admit "as of today we do not know the answer” when challenged on the price tag, but insisted, without providing evidence, that:

There have been estimates already done by government that say that if we’re able to digitise lots of these customer services, we can save tens and tens of billions of pounds every year. Tens of billions of pounds a year that is currently going on very unproductive call centers, lots of paper shuffling, slow processes.

[Spoiler - with or without a national digital ID scheme, the paper-shuffling will go on! The political will will once again run head long into the administrative ‘won’t’ and inertia will rule. It was ever thus.]

Data grab

There will still inevitably be concern about a perceived data grab by Big Government even in the modified version of the plans to date. The UK Government seems to have woken up to this and is placing a lot of emphasis on what it won’t be used for. So, for example, it will not be required to access the NHS, nor will it be used for key educational purposes, following skepticism from both the Department of Health and the Department for Education.

The IDs will also not include biological sex or gender, with the consultation document arguing that these are not needed for access to most public services, and will probably not include addresses, (although the ‘bin collection’ pitch would make that necessary, surely? Or is this being made up as they go along?). Jones says:

Our baseline is to start with the fewest data points possible, enough to simply prove you are who you say you are and nothing more – but if more is needed to support the uses you and other members of the public want, like proving your address, that's something we'll explore.

But there will still be concern around data gathering and future potential uses. The consultation confirms that government will be able to retain someone’s data for “as long as needed” even if they decide to delete their digital ID.  The Government will also be allowed to revoke someone’s ID or take enforcement action if you don’t keep it up-to-date.

And the Cabinet Office has argued that “There is a legal basis for police use of facial recognition, which may include access to biometric data held by government”, which has led civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, to warn:

Snuck into the consultation is an admission that the police would be allowed to repurpose our digital ID photos as mugshots to create a population-wide facial recognition database.

It is for precisely this reason that the public is rightly sceptical of a sprawling ID system that has been sold to us under various guises - whether to 'stop the boats' or improve public services - but which invariably hands more power and more of our personal information to the state, at our expense.

My take

There’s still a lot up for grabs here and more u-turns and policy pivots are to be expected before anything approaching a working system gets into circulation. The one thing that does appear to have been locked down is that development of the digital ID tech will be handled in-house by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and not shipped out to, largely US, private contractors. Jones confirmed:

This system is a piece of sovereign technology capability and the responsibility for the design, build and running of it will be within Government with the support of the GDS. It will not be outsourced to a private company

I’d love to know how that will go down with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been a fierce advocate of digital ID since he was in office. His post-Premiership thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has pushed the case for such a scheme enthusiastically for years, but has warned:

Digital ID cannot become another failed government IT project, drowning in process, over-spending and under-delivering. A modern platform for a modern state can be built quickly, learning from users and iterating in real time.

As the Prime Minister who set in motion the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), the single most ambitious/disastrous UK public sector digital program, Blair is well-qualified to warn of the dangers of “failed government IT’. That particular scheme, signed off after a one hour sales pitch in Downing Street, ended up costing the UK taxpayer between £10 and £20 billion, depending on which estimates you buy into, to very little noticeable effect and lots of legal action as private contractors sued the government over their contracts.

To this day, NPfIT stands as the totemic example of how not to do public sector IT programs. So when Blair says digital ID mustn’t become a “failed government IT” project, you might be forgiven for thinking, he’s got a bloody nerve. You might also be forgiven for wondering how the ‘no outsourcing to private contractors’ line in the sand will sit with the TBI’s paymasters, who include a lot of US Big Tech firms who’d usually be front-and-center in the running for just such a big government program...

There is going to be reality-TV show style stunt in the coming months which will see 100 randomly-selected members of the public drafted in - will there be a Saturday nite TV show with Simon Cowell to pick the ‘winners’? -  to have their say as part of a so-called People’s Panel. This does immediately remind me that a camel is famously said to be horse designed by a committee, but...

Look, if you’re a UK taxpayer, it’s in your interests to have your say on all this anyway. . Check out the consultation here and have your say! It will be too late to complain once it's all been signed into law.