The digital ID consultation is out, with a whole lot of questions for you to answer – while the Government has ignored significant questions NO2ID and others have been asking for months and, in some cases, years.
We published several of our questions on 4 November 2025, shortly before the first delay to the consultation, and discussed several of them with (now former) ID Minister Josh Simons later that month, as well as senior officials from Cabinet Office and DSIT.
We also said they needed to write things down – and now they have, everyone can see the issues they are avoiding. But enough of what the Government hasn’t said (for now). What exactly have they said?
In his Ministerial foreword to the 91-page consultation document, ID Minister Darren Jones says the digital ID scheme “will be built on three core principles” – that it will be “useful”, “secure”, and “for everyone”. So let’s examine those principles:
“Useful”? Useful sounds useful, but useful for who? Government claims its digital ID will be useful for you, but fails to explain how it will be far more useful to them – allowing Departments and services to link together what they think they know about you, with sometimes serious consequences: HMRC knew who people were, yet it stopped their Child Benefit anyway. ID won’t ‘fix’ serious issues with our public services, and may supercharge harms from unchecked government data ‘sharing’.
As the Minister says, it often is “too hard to get what you need from the government, when you need it”, but the ‘proving who you are’ bit is only one part of getting a service or benefit. Think about all of the other information you are required to hand over when claiming UC, or filling in your tax return – using forms which get ever more complicated, which you’re required to fill in more and more frequently.
“Secure”? People inside government have been sounding the alarm about DSIT’s One Login – the entry point to the digital ID system, the ‘mouth’ of the ID funnel trap – for nearly a year.
Alarm bells started ringing last April, and in May One Login lost its certification for DSIT’s own digital ID ‘trust framework’! In November, the former head of MI6 and MPs expressed concerns, and more whistleblowers spoke out again just before Christmas. Does the consultation mention any of this, or explain how these serious risks in the existing parts of its digital ID system have been mitigated?
“For everyone”? If digital ID isn’t supposed to be compulsory, and if it’s a genuine option or choice, then people should be able to not have one if they don’t want one.
“For everyone” reveals the intended architecture of the ID system: assign everyone an ID number (the unique number in the digital ID ‘credential’) by which you can be tracked throughout your life, by requiring you to have government code (the App and Wallet) on your phone, which – over time – you’ll be required to use to access any and all benefits, public services, etc. And if they can use an ID number to link and track anyone, they will use it to link and track everyone.
“That will never happen”, they say? The process is already underway! Since 18 November, millions of company Directors have been required to verify a One Login account to submit their legal returns – with “shadow” Accounts being created for everyone who doesn’t do their own identity verification.
We’ve learned a few other things from the Government’s announcements about ID cards on your phone. For example, the “prototypes” of what they’re planning digital ID to be in the GOV.UK App were shown only on screen to journalists, but aren’t being shown to others – we can’t find any sign of them on the Government website.
Perhaps more importantly, these ‘mockups’ aren’t part of the actual consultation; there’s nowhere on the form to talk about them. The Government clearly assumes its digital ID demonstration contains no information that could inform people’s responses. Indeed, the demo may be so uninformative that they’re only showing it to political journalists, with less functionality than they put on YouTube last year.
The consultation on what Ministers are describing as a “foundational” ID system, which will fundamentally change the relationship between citizen and state, runs for only 8 weeks – not the full 12, as would be more appropriate for a change of such significance. And there will be “roadshows”…
Even if the Government did take the extra four weeks to explain its profoundly significant new policy, it would likely have little impact, given the consultation document makes it clear that the so-called ‘People’s Panel on Digital ID’ which follows “will not make decisions”.
There’s no box you can tick in the consultation to say “NO” to ID – so, just as happened with BlairCards in the 00s, that tick may need to happen at the ballot box. (We note digital ID wasn’t in Labour’s manifesto at the last election…) This begs the question if anything new will be said, or if these roadshows are little more than ‘safe seat stunts’ designed to minimise the electoral impact of digital ID on Labour constituents?
Meanwhile, Number Two ID minister (James Frith) just sent out a ridiculous set of slides, asking civil society organisations whose questions he and his predecessor have refused to answer to run “Workshops” spouting Government ID spin – thereby demonstrating either incredibly poor judgement, extreme naivety, or a disturbingly authoritarian mindset. Are citizens only supposed to talk about digital ID in the Government’s own terms, singing to a government hymn sheet?
The whole ‘consultation’ process – clearly James hasn’t had time to redesign it – is pretty much what you’d expect from a former Facebook employee who became a Minister and had to resign in disgrace for abusing databases to smear legitimate journalists.
As promised, unless the Government decides to rethink, NO2ID’s 2026 (re)launch will be on Friday 20th March, where we’ll go through the new ID Minister’s “Workshop in a Box” together. We might rewrite the slides in the process…
We’ll be publishing more on the consultation documents in due course. If you’d like to read things as soon as we have published them, you can subscribe to our Substack – to read it will always be free, but paid subscriptions and/or donations are always much appreciated!
