PM to set out plans for digital ID cards

Rowena Mason Robert Booth

The Guardian
Sep 26, 2025

All working adults will need digital ID cards under plans to be announced by Keir Starmer today, in a move that will spark a battle with civil liberties campaigners.\r

The prime minister will set out the plans at a conference on how progressive politicians can tackle the country’s problems, including addressing immigration concerns.\r

The proposals for a “Brit card” would require legislation and are already facing opposition from privacy campaigners. However, No 10 is understood to believe that it is necessary to make sure people have the right to work in the UK in order to tackle illegal migration, and that the national mood has moved on since Tony Blair’s plans for ID cards were abandoned in the 2000s.\r

Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, backs the plans, having said her “long-term personal political view has always been in favour of ID cards”.

Starmer said this month that digital IDs could “play an important part” in making Britain less attractive to illegal migrants and France has repeatedly claimed that the lack of official cards acts as a “pull factor”.\r

In advance of his speech today, Starmer spoke about the government’s goal of “patriotic renewal”, comparing it with “the politics of grievance, of toxic divide, which is what Reform are all about”. He dismissed the Conservative party as “basically dead”.\r

He will set out his view today that the far right is injecting a “poisonous” discourse into national life, saying: “At its heart – its most poisonous belief – on full display at the protests here in London, just a week or two ago, that there is a coming struggle, a defining struggle, a violent struggle, for the nation. For all our nations.\r

“Now – you don’t need to be a historian to know where that kind of poison can lead. You can just feel it. A language that is naked in its attempt to intimidate.”\r

But he will also explain his belief that immigration and borders need to be controlled, saying: “For too many years it’s been too easy for people to come here, slip into the shadow economy and remain here illegally.”\r

Starmer will add: “It is not compassionate leftwing politics to rely on labour that exploits foreign workers and undercuts fair wages. But the simple fact that every nation needs to have control over its borders.”\r

The Guardian revealed in June that Downing Street was exploring new proposals for a digital ID card to crack down on illegal migration, rogue landlords and exploitative work.\r

The idea came from a Labour Together paper given to the No 10 policy unit proposing a Brit Card, which it claimed could help avoid another Windrush scandal. The thinktank paper also said it would help reduce vast numbers of visa overstayers, saying half of those whose asylum claims had been turned down over the past 14 years were probably still in the UK.\r

It proposed a free, secure digital ID, stored on a smartphone using ministers’ planned gov.uk Wallet app, rebranded as the Brit Card app. That could then be verified by employers, immigration, banks and landlords using a free verifier app.\r

The report’s author and the thinktank’s director of technology, Kirsty Innes, is now a special adviser to Liz Kendall, the technology secretary. When the paper was published, she said: “A progressive society can only work if we have meaningful borders. BritCard would make it far harder to flout the illegal work and illegal rent rules, and far easier to identify and punish exploitative illegal employers and landlords.”\r

The plans were welcomed by the Tony Blair Institute, with its director of government innovation, Alexander Iosad, saying: “Make no mistake, if the government announces a universal digital ID to help improve our public services, it would be one of the most important steps taken by this or any government to make British citizens’ everyday lives easier and build trust.”\r

However, they were opposed by David Davis, the Conservative MP and former cabinet minister who led the charge against Blair’s ID cards decades ago. “No system is immune to failure, and we have seen time and again governments and tech giants fail to protect people’s personal data. If world-leading companies cannot protect our data, I have little faith that Whitehall would be able to do better,” he said.\r

The Liberal Democrats said they “cannot support a mandatory digital ID where people are forced to turn over their private data just to go about their daily lives” .\r

The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, said: “There are arguments for and against digital ID, but mandating its use would be a very serious step that requires a proper national debate.”\r

Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, pointed out that the digital ID card scheme was not in Labour’s manifesto, arguing that it is “the last thing this government should be embarking on during a cost of living crisis”.\r

“Labour are at risk of creating a digital surveillance infrastructure that will change everyone’s daily lives and establish a pre-crime state where we constantly have to prove who we are as we go about our daily lives.”\r

David Rennie, a former official at the Home Office’s identity cards programme and now chief trust officer at the startup Orchestrating Identity, said it was “absurd” to suggest digital ID would stop illegal migration. “Employers already have to prove a prospective employee’s right to work in the UK or receive a £45,000 fine,” he said.

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