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? 

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[NO2ID press release sent on 9/3/26, with updates and additional references]

Responding to ID Minister Darren Jones’ statements to Parliament last week, [1] and an article in The Times today [2] detailing a “Cabinet revolt”, UK-wide non-partisan campaign NO2ID [3] warned of the Government’s imminent tone-deaf relaunch and repositioning of digital ID cards in the midst of an international crisis.

Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator said:

“The only times the UK successfully introduced ID cards was in WWI and WWII. [4] The Blair Government tried again after 9/11 and, having claimed they’d stop Islamist terrorism, Tony helped his mate George start a war in Iraq. Now in 2026 he’s backing his buddies Ben and Donald on Iran. [5]

“Having announced the Blair government-in-exile’s digital ID cards scheme last September with no mandate, [6] prompting widespread derision – and with his first ID Minister just having resigned in disgrace – Mr Starmer is taking another shot, this time spinning Blair’s ID cards as the panacea for our broken public services. [7] Don’t mention the war, Keir!

“When people found out ‘non compulsory’ ID cards [8] really mean lifelong tracking and a politically controlled government IT system determining if you are ‘valid’ or not, the public rejected them last time. The cards might be government code on your phone this time, but the effect is the same and the British people will reject them again.”

– ENDS –

Notes for editors

1) Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones gave oral evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on ‘New digital forms of ID’ on 3 March 2026. In response to Question 147, the Minister responsible for ID said:

Robbie Moore: Do we have a date yet for when the consultation will go live?

Darren Jones: I am hoping that it will be next week. The actual day is moving around a little bit, but it should be next week.

2) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-digital-id-cabinet-hkcgc6qpl – The Times, 9 March 2026

3) Originally founded in 2004, NO2ID is the independent UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the Database State. This post is a more extensively referenced copy of today’s press release – for ongoing and up to date information on the government’s digital ID scheme, see https://www.no2id.uk/news/ or subscribe to NO2ID’s Substack https://no2id.substack.com/ 

4) Of the 20 independent states that existed in Europe after WWII that are now members of the EU, ID cards were initially introduced / forcibly imposed in 18 of them under Nazi or Soviet occupation, or a ‘homegrown’ dictator. Churchill’s post-war Government abolished WWII ID cards in 1952, having imposed them in the UK during the war – as well as in Cyprus and Malta, which were at that point British colonies.

5) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15623903/Tony-Blair-rebukes-Keir-Starmer-not-backing-Trump-Iran.html – Daily Mail, 7 March 2026

6) Even the CEO of Palantir UK went on the record last October, stating that Palantir “won’t  participate in the market engagement” for digital ID cards because it has no “clear public mandate”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYh5sq51DiM  [transcript]

7) ID Minister Darren Jones gave a speech on 20 January 2026 in which he laid out his “Move fast. Fix things” plan to “rewire” Whitehall, ‘fix’ the public services, and build a new digital state based on the government’s “foundational” digital ID system. More detail here: https://www.no2id.uk/2026/move-fast-fix-things-and-clean-up/ 

8) In the 2000s, while the Blair Government initially consulted on compulsory “entitlement cards”, they said they would drop the compulsory element while admitting they were trying to introduce ID cards. When the Identity Cards Act was passed in 2006, the law stated that being put on the Home Office’s lifelong ID cards database (the ‘National Identity Register’) was compulsory, if you wanted to have a passport.

As NO2ID’s General Secretary wrote in 2009, so-called “voluntary” ID cards – conceived by civil servant Sylvanus Vivian in 1934 – are designed to have a “parasitic vitality”:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jun/30/idcards-terrorism

In the 2020s, digital ID will be compulsory for Right to Work checks and, over time, to access services and benefits your taxes have paid for. While details of the proposed digital ID itself are yet to be determined, millions are already being forced to biometrically verify themselves in the One Login ‘funnel trap’, and are being assigned ‘shadow’ Accounts – a lifelong, compulsory government record which some may not even know they have:  

https://www.no2id.uk/2026/no-u-turn-on-the-government-account-youll-be-forced-to-have/

For further information or for immediate or future interview, please contact Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator, on coordinator@no2id.uk or 07974 230 839

The Minister responsible for ID cards has resigned from Government after he was caught out for having used databases and other means to dig up dirt on journalists.

His defence was that he was innocent enough not to be fired because he didn’t understand the consequences of his actions. That may be true, or it may be obfuscation. Either way, his position was untenable and on a good day to bury bad news, he inevitably resigned. 

As was becoming abundantly clear, the former Minister didn’t understand the consequences of his ID card decisions either.

Government continues, and a new ID Minister has been appointed.

That new Minister won’t have had the training at Facebook and won’t have written a book explaining to readers why ID cards should be implemented as Facebook would do it. And new Ministers mean past assumptions and decisions may be revisited – which can be a good and bad thing… 

The mandate can come back – though it never really went away because if you want to get a job, register a birth, send your kid to school, or interact with the State in any way, you’ll still need a (One?) Login to a Government Account that always requires the same one name.

NO2ID’s questions for the consultation are still valid, and still unanswered.

Despite asking multiple times in meetings and in written communications, we’ve not had a clear answer on whether the delivery plan for One Login and associated services will force people who have both married and maiden names to pick one, which will be all they can use in their interactions with the public sector. 

Will the new Minister’s first decision be to force people to change their name so his database can work?

UK border rules about passports are being changed at short notice – so short that some people have left the UK without knowing they won’t be let back in. Is the Home Office saying anyone who goes away must have their UK papers with them every time they travel? Will that extend domestically too? 

As ever, the3million are the guinea pigs in the ID coal mine, which now covers 10 million people – and the Home Office (and others) would like it to cover everyone. 

Now, even after you’ve proven your status and paid the Home Office for citizenship, HO is forcing you to maintain a passport before it will allow you back into the country of which you’ve become a citizen – or to pay £589 for a “certificate of entitlement” if you choose not be entered onto another of its biometric surveillance registers. (For those feeling this is OK for ‘others’, the same applies to Brits who live in countries with similarly black-and-white rules, especially if their kids were born there…)

Surveillance Nationalism isn’t just coming for you and your kids via your passports, as it did under the Blair Government’s previous ID scheme. In the 2000s, ID cards “weren’t compulsory” (sound familiar?) but you couldn’t get a passport without being numbered, biometrically verified, and captured permanently on a National Identity Register. 

Will the same be true in the 2020s for your ‘right’ to get a job or a place to live?

The same is true in other contexts, where other numbers are assigned to people. Using NHS numbers for health care is one thing; reusing them as children’s identifiers is quite another, even if it has DH involvement initially. Once used in that context, giving them over to the police as ‘victim identifiers’ for child safeguarding would be entirely within the remit of DfE and the Home Office – thus making child abuse victims traceable by the police, for life. 

While children stop being children after a while, they (hopefully) continue to be alive – and your NHS number follows you for life, available to anyone who looks you up. The very fact that someone’s number has been recorded in this context will show anyone who looks that they’re a survivor of abuse. 

Promises made about uses one day can be torn up tomorrow 

Wes Streeting has chosen to reuse data held by the NHS for pandemic-only purposes for other uses that he alone chooses, unilaterally revoking unequivocal promises made to ensure confidence in decision making. 

These are things that government can do when it wants to move fast, and the civil service sees no problem with any of them because permanent officials serving temporary masters rarely feel the burden.

Special Advisers* meanwhile want the political wins without adequate discussions across boundaries. SpAds think something is good because a Director General in DWP thinks it’s a good idea as it makes their life easier. Carer’s Allowance was fine because the DG and DWP said and still think it was a good idea – despite the independent inquiry confirming, and the Government supposedly accepting, that it wasn’t.

The scandals of officials and SpAds who don’t give a damn, cause widespread harm and blame anyone but themselves are a drum beat, steadily increasing in pace: from Windrush, Post Office Horizon, and Grenfell to infected blood, Child Benefit ‘crackdowns’, and quarterly tax requirements.

The system prefers to do what it wants as easily as possible, which means the costs fall on others. ‘Minor administrative cleanups’ (more pasty tax than Poll Tax) shift burdens onto the public, not the institution. As with Chip and PIN liability shifts in banking, supermarket self-checkouts and other Surveillance Capitalism wheezes, it’s what digital tools have always been used for.

Forcing people to maintain a British passport may make things easier for the Home Office, and maybe it’s even worth doing, but rushing out a scheme without considering the entirely predictable consequences looks more like malignity than mere incompetence. When PAYE returns became monthly, government took on some of the facilitation of that via software; for quarterly tax reporting they have refused to help, and tax payers must seek commercial solutions on the open market .

So rather than rushing into rewiring the state, maybe it’s time to take a breath, understand why and how damage is done and how it can be avoided, start to demonstrate some actual accountability, stop ‘innovating’ for innovation’s sake, and try to actually improve things for the people government is there to serve?

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*Complex decisions are increasingly made by “Advisers”, special or otherwise (Ministers acting as SpAds, PMs acting as Permanent Secretaries, Silicon Valley refugees and PMs-in-exile…) rather than by elected Public Servants acting with responsibility on behalf of the power of the Crown. And when Ministers rubber stamp “advice” – which may come from incorrigible former SpAds in Opposition too – without caring about the consequences for everyone, things tend to end in failure.

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On 20th January, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones gave a “Move fast. Fix things” speech on rewiring Whitehall and building the new digital state. We’ve gone through it line by line, with commentary, in this document. [Original sources: video + civil service text and related interview.]

Those who picked What3Words as the location for the Minister’s speech probably didn’t even know it has an unfixable problem which means the system promoted for emergency services sometimes sends rescuers to the wrong mountain – a minor but illustrative consequence of small underinformed teams who don’t know what they don’t know, and of a lack of awareness amongst political decision makers because PR budgets and lawyers overwhelm stories of real world victims (who may not survive institutional failure)…

Similarly, while think tank discussion papers can sound wonderful over canapes at TBI or Labour Together HQ, they all too often ignore the real world. 

It used to be that those mounting a coup would send a platoon to the TV or radio station – now they also need to send a laptop to the data centre. One of the first acts of the second Trump administration was to have DOGE copy anything they wanted into the data systems that Palantir had built for them. It’s no longer enough to have an absolutely loyal military, you also need a loyal technical team who care more about the mission than about citizens. 

We note Sir Tony is building his own tech team to allow him to impose digital services on his parish in Gaza. His ‘Gaza Digital Service’ may take some lessons from this speech, but is unlikely to instil confidence in the people who are subject to it.

The consequences of ‘two pizzas’

Tech companies do ‘pre-mortems’, government can use the full force of law.

NHS England’s care.data assumed it could just take opted-out data anyway (and blew up); Carer’s Allowance criminalised people who fell into the chasm between the old system and the new; DeepMind thought the law didn’t apply to them; and the calculation of Ofqual’s algorithm was that if anyone could fail then someone must fail.

Two pizzas may be enough for a small team of committed individuals to do something for the population – where that thing is optional, and when the population gets a say. It’s nowhere near sufficient to do things to the population, especially when it can be imposed without choice. (Noting that, like ’optional’ changes on Facebook, the GOV.UK app will be updated without choice…)

Those who got to eat pizzas at Amazon also had to see and listen to the customer support queries that came as a result of their decisions – they were not detached from that process or the effects of their decisions. Those who redesigned Carer’s Allowance weren’t required to pay attention to the whole process, so continued on entirely unaware that the process they’d designed was resulting in honest people being criminalised and having their life savings taken away.

At population scale, the uniqueness of someone’s life amounts to little more than some complexity hidden in ‘rounding errors’ which will delay an entire project and don’t fit into a(ny) business case – and no-one who could pick up the phone to the PM will think it important enough to do so.

Delivering improvement for all

If you truly want to fix things, you need Challenge. Improvement, not ‘novelty’. And also robust mechanisms to ensure that Principles, not just targets, are met.

The thing that stopped a bunch of these identity and data debacles from 2011-2024 was PCAG under the CDL; post-election it was moved to DSIT and then immediately sent a “termination letter”.

Good intentions need systems to ensure those intentions survive – and how government talks to itself (and to industry) is very different from how it talks to the public. Compare this speech and this post with the blog post and fisking of the CSW piece we did last week…

The fundamental question is not what the original Ministerial intent was, but what the machine below does with that intent in practice. The Official Truth has to be simple, but constituents have complex lives. 

We have been asking the question on Multiplicity in the ID scheme for months now, and we understand there’s no coherent answer that will interact well with reality. That may be ‘civil service defensible’, but it is not publicly defensible. In the current Login structure, identity providers are HMPO/DVLA etc, possibly including DWP-UC, and “identifiers” means the way you login – since people are not limited to only one email address and phone number. Unless the HO wishes you to only ever have one of those, in which case, which is one way to stop Ministers using personal email addresses for official work.

Giving autonomy to a small team that won’t answer hard questions means you end up with a broken small programme later rather than a stalled-later programme now. 

Perhaps ask the victims of the Carer’s Allowance scandal which they’d prefer?

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In addition to our infrequent bulletin, you can also join our free substack to get emailed whenever we post some news or commentary.

Hello! A special welcome to those new to NO2ID, and to the Government’s continuing plans for ID cards. This is the first of what we expect to be our ‘monthly’ Bulletin – though the frequency may vary according to circumstances, and what the Government tries doing.  

What do we know so far?

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Taking inspiration from Sam Trendall’s excellent summary in Civil Service World, and before it starts actually writing things down in the consultation, we thought we’d take a look at what the Government has said about its digital ID scheme.

(If you want the ‘deep dive’, here’s a Google Doc copy of the article with added comments; if you prefer not to use Google, there’s a copy in Word format here.)

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Many of you have already joined our two mailing lists.

The NO2ID Bulletin – will get periodic updates in which we’ll give a summary of where things are, and (whenever possible) what’s likely to be coming next. We intend the Bulletin to be something you can read to stay informed, and forward to others to help keep them informed too. You can join that list in the column on the right of our website. We’ll use the list sparingly, probably sending a Bulletin every month or three – although we may send more frequent updates at busier times. Bulletins will also get posted to this website.

NO2ID also has a free Substack which gets updated whenever we publish anything here. The Substack will potentially get multiple updates a week (or day!) at busier times, if you want to be kept bang up to date by email. Our Substack subscribers got notified when we posted about digital ID supposedly “not being mandatory”. Our public posts will always be free but there’s an option to donate via Substack when you subscribe, for those who wish to do so.

We also accept donations directly via our website, including one-off and monthly donations via PayPal.

We would very much like to do a 2026 version of the much-loved (and still worn!) NO2ID metal pin badges from the 2004-2011 campaign. To get things started, we’ll send the first five people who donate more than £40 a batch of five badges (when they are ready – your donations will help us do the first manufacturing run, which takes a month). [We will delete this paragraph from our website when the offer expires]

We eagerly await the questions they won’t ask: https://www.no2id.uk/2025/upcoming-consultation/

How is ID not “mandatory” if they create you an account anyway?

In an attempt to ‘change the public mood’ before the Government begins consulting on its new ID scheme, “government sources” have briefed journalists that digital ID “will no longer be mandatory” for British citizens to prove their right to work in the UK.

All the Home Office Right to Work checks remain, as do Right to Rent and other mandatory checks – and while government has yet to write down the details of its new ‘digital ID card’, it is rolling ahead with digital versions of your passport and driving license, and an ever-expanding requirement to register for and (only) use One Login when accessing services.

Given how slavishly it mirrors the thinking of the Blair government-in-exile, the 2026 process is following a well-trodden path. In 2002, ID cards were first proposed as mandatory “entitlement cards” for access to services. Over the next four years, this evolved into the Blair Government’s supposedly “voluntary” ID card and National Identity Register, which you couldn’t avoid if you wanted a passport. 

The ‘card’ this time may be a digital credential that sits on your phone, which you won’t be able to avoid if you want to use any government service once Government has “reimagined” the relationship between the citizen and the state.  

While the headlines talk of a U-turn, the ID scheme that is already being rolled out includes “shadow” accounts which are created for everyone who doesn’t do their own identity verification for a One Login account. They are already doing this to company directors, they’re considering doing it for babies at birth and potentially for all children in school.

Number 10 may be trying to “scrape the barnacles off the boat”, and may even drop some of the most stupid bits that their favourite think tank got them to announce without thinking through implementation. Ministers announce things with a flourish; regrets and U-turns may follow. But don’t be fooled. The ID scheme isn’t dead yet, and government still hasn’t answered really basic questions about it – like whether they’ll force married women to change their names. If it’s one account per person in their database, all linked together, what will that name on that account be?

Ministers and officials can say different things about intent, but the underlying principle remains the same. The unchanged aspects of the ID programme continue to rewrite the relationship between citizen and state on Labour’s terms, replacing the UK’s proudly permissive culture – where one is free to act unless explicitly forbidden by law – with a ‘Papers Please’ regime of constant verification and oversight.

And unless cast iron guarantees are written on the face of primary legislation, Blair and his acolytes will keep coming back for more…

Words in speeches are one thing; delivering on those words is something else. 

Thus far on ‘digital ID’ there has been one short speech by the Prime Minister and a few media interviews which mostly contradict each other. There’s also a mountain of papers from the Blair government-in-exile, and from other lobbyists wanting their thing.

While commercial companies can do whatever they want and announce it later – because (mostly) no one cares – Government is different. 

Government has to write things down. This takes time and effort. Government has to listen and hear how people respond in consultations, and think about what they say – or just ignore them all, if the consultation is a sham.

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