UK government rolls back key part of digital ID plans

Ministers have rolled back plans for a central element of the proposed digital ID plans, leaving open the possibility that people will be able to use other forms of identification to prove their right to work.

This will mean that the IDs, announced to some controversy in September, will no longer be mandatory for working-age people, given that the only planned obligatory element was to prove the right to work in the UK.

While officials said this was not a U-turn, just a tweak before a detailed consultation on how the system will function, it will be viewed as the latest in a series of policy changes, including on business rates and inheritance tax for farmers.

When Keir Starmer announced the proposal for digital IDs by 2029 they were billed as voluntary, with the exception that they would be mandatory for people to show they were legally allowed to work.

This was portrayed by the prime minister as a main benefit of the plan. “Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK,” he said. “It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure.”

People will still be required to verify their ID digitally, by a process still to be finished, but this could involve existing documents such as a passport.

@amuse
@amuse

UK: The British Prime Minister wants to ban X and its Grok because people keep making satirical pictures of him in bikinis, meanwhile he’s got no problem with Microsoft’s Ai being used by British police to justify banning Jewish soccer fans from games in communities with large Islamic populations.

UK police leadership admitted to MPs that Microsoft AI was used to fabricate evidence to bar Jewish soccer fans from a match at Villa Park. Chief Constable Craig Guildford apologized for misleading the public with false claims he used to justify the ban. He told Parliament he feared Jewish fans would be attacked by local Islamic migrants.

11:41 AM · Jan 14, 2026 3,287 Views

https://x.com/amuse/status/2011478759774245244

BTW, there’s a dandy pic of Two Tier in a bikini at the link.

WRONG! Digital ID for non-Brits has been around for a few years now, for LEGAL migration (work/residency permits.)

And this’ll bust your noggin. The only time I have ever needed to apply for biometric digital ID, and get fingerprinted, it was to do precisely that, about fifteen years ago... when I first traveled to the USA for business reasons.

In spring 2022, people from Ukraine who applied to live in the UK had to have sponsors who were already British citizens/residents/employers (some came in on work visas, others came in through the Homes for Ukraine scheme, and were sponsored by families offering accommodation). After settling in they attended a visa center to go through ID verification with professionals who do nothing but ID document verification all day every day, so they’re trained to spot forgeries from a mile off. If everything at the visa center checked out, a credential was created to reflect the fact that the individual has a verified visa or verified biometric residence permit associated with a newly issued digital ID.

All identity verification for that person from that point on can be facilitated through a challenge-and-response mechanism enabled by mobile apps, where a one-time code and the digital credential both get verified across requestor, applicant AND issuer. In practice, it works like Apple/Google/Microsoft Authenticator. Upshot is, an employer/school/landlord can get proof that the person they’re dealing with (a) has a genuine verified ID, (b) is presenting their ID rather than someone elses’, and (c) has an active right to work/study/rent in the UK.

If you don’t have THIS setup, you have a system of self-attestation (which in most cases boils down to “here’s my driving license and it has to be genuine because I say it is!”). These days, even monogrammed, hologrammed photocard IDs can be faked, and card cloning techniques are sophisticated enough that even a fake card with proximity loops can effortlessly let you through turnstiles and passive proximity doorlocks. But, compared to them, driving license photo ID is a DUMB card.

So... Why is the system getting so much pushback?

1. It has only been approved for a subset of migration use cases. Until the UK makes this digital system and process UBIQUITOUS for all migration use cases, without exception, there’ll always be migrants who can fall back on “I came to the UK via a different route” and THEY are the ones who get to fall back on self-attestation of manual ID. (Waving bits of plastic around, letters, paper licenses, etc.)

2. To make the ID verification system completely impersonation-resistant to the extent that it prevents illegals from exercise rights they don’t have (like voting rights!), you need all citizens and all immigrants to be enrolled in the same system. But, of course, what this means is, you end up “inconveniencing” 95% of the general population in order to ensure the 5% who are presenting fake ID have nowhere to hide.

In reality, saying “immigrants must prove they’re legal” only works if you’re NOT making an exception for an entire demographic; if you basically say that you don’t want non-immigrants to be checked at all, then the illegals are simply going to figure out how they can exploit the exception and carry on beating the system.

3. Even if the “Microsoft Authenticator” approach to the digital ID system works, and doesn’t transmit anything other than audit data back to the government system, the perception of it being abused by government to REVOKE permissions or DELETE YOU FROM DA SYSTEM has been sold so spectacularly well that nobody trusts it even as a voluntary opt-in system. So when government admitted that it can only work properly if it’s 100% mandatory for everybody, they immediately lost the argument.

4. Because it’ll never work fully if it’s not compulsory, limited success outside of the Ukraine-specific test case will be used as an argument to scrap the system - “We might as well bin it as a failed experiment and go back to self-attestation of non-digital ID”. There is a problem with this - if we don’t enforce the same system on Somalis as we’ve already enforced on Ukrainians, OF COURSE it’s not going to show any benefit when dealing with illegal migration from Somalia- and “going back” to the non-digital system actually means embracing the system that’s failing instead of the system that’s working.

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