Digital ID: an obituary?

Before Andy Burnham had even gone to Buckingham Palace or stood on the steps of Downing Street, he announced digital ID was dead. Don’t expect a eulogy from these quarters. It was an ill-conceived policy rushed out of the door on the eve of Labour Party conference to grab headlines. Burnham’s promised priorities’ reset couldn’t be more welcome, but only if he is able to root out the flawed logic that allowed such a defective policy to become the centrepiece of Labour’s tech strategy.

Today, it is therefore worth reflecting on what this failed policy tells us about the British state and its approach to digitalisation – and what a better, human-centred approach could look like instead.

1.     Always putting the cart before the horse in digital policy

Digital ID is the worst example of a bad habit in the British state of creating digital solutions in search of problems. We saw the full cycle of digital policy making in fast-forward with digital ID. Think tanks promised a silver bullet to illegal working in the form of a digital credential. Government seized the opportunity to get some headlines.

Policymakers were then forced to grapple with the fact that this was an extremely complex area and that forcing people to have a digital ID created a host of tricky exclusionary problems for people without smartphones, internet access and digital skills. Human rights organisations, like Liberty, pointed out the privacy, security, and discrimination risks that such a system would create. People started to get angry about being forced to sign up for a digital ID that they didn’t want. Three million people signed a petition demanding that the Government drop the policy. Polling support, which had initially been high, collapsed.

The Government had to quickly pivot, moving away from migration and towards digitally transforming the state. Suddenly, digital ID was the answer to our bug bears with public services, created by a decade and a half of under-investment and austerity. Digital ID became a roaming solution to whack on all matter of complex policy issues. The Government must learn to take step back and consider: is this a digital problem at all? Does it need a digital solution? If so, what should that look like and what will it take to improve people’s interactions with the state? This will be an essential lesson to learn as AI becomes more and more embedded within our public services.

2.    The relentless expansion of the hostile environment, whatever the cost

The British state’s instinct to extend the hostile environment to every aspect of our lives, even where doing so requires major increases in surveillance of us all, needs to be broken. Migrants have been pushed into more and more vulnerable situations by escalating surveillance and exclusion. Migrants are much more likely to be victims of modern slavery and are disincentivised from reporting crimes. This system is not reducing migration, but it is hurting some of the most marginalised people in the UK. It needs to end.

3.     The centralising instinct of the British state

The digital ID was also a victim of the Government’s love of centralisation. The EU strove to create a citizen-first digital ID, designed with users’ needs in mind, so their ID is decentralised, stored on the user’s phone, and hands more power over data sharing to the user. The UK was designing a digital ID that would serve the state more than the citizen. The single unique identifier would have tracked us across the state, making the Government’s life easier by linking all our information. They could have decided to create a decentralised infrastructure that would put the power in our hands and give us the ability to consent to each linkage of our information.

The surveillance risks of the Government’s approach are real. We have seen this harm in practice in the United States, where ICE is using centralised health databases to build detailed profiles of people to enable ICE raids. Surveillance is not a hypothetical risk – it hands power over our lives to the Government. Burnham has promised to break this centralising instinct in the British state. A devolution-forward approach to digital policy, designed with the people instead of Government in mind, would be incredibly welcome.

The lingering issues

As we noted when this policy was first announced, there is a case for a privacy-protective way to prove who you are online. We live in a world where we face constant identification requests, and the only ways we have to prove our identity are incredibly intrusive and share more information about ourselves than is strictly needed. But the British state’s instincts, as outlined above, make it a dangerous project to put in their hands.

It is also worth noting here that whilst the controversy-catching digital ID has been retired, many of the underlying policy objectives of the project will continue on without its unpopular banner. Migrants still need to have digital ID in the form of the eVisa, which is still riddled with technical issues and causes constant problems for those who rely on it to prove they can be in the UK. The Government’s digital identity projects which long pre-date the digital ID announcement will continue on, with less scrutiny than their unpopular cousin attracted. Some of the policy ideas raised by the digital ID scheme, particularly the single unique identifier, seem unlikely to die with the digital ID.

What is needed now?

Burnham must put his policy where his comms is – we want to see a real reset of Labour’s approach to tech policy. Our human rights are at risk from the British state’s instinct to reach for technology first and ask questions later. Facial recognition, AI, and digital ID all promise solutions to real problems, but hands the state massive power over our lives. We need the Government to grapple with the real risks this tech creates.

The Government has the opportunity to set out a positive vision for tech, just as Burnham promises us a more positive, optimistic approach to being Prime Minister. He can start by putting the people, not the Government, at the heart of his tech strategy.