UK to launch spending, delivery inquiry into national digital identity scheme

The UK’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has announced an inquiry into digital ID in Britain. A government release says the inquiry, among a batch of five, will provide scrutiny of spending and delivery around the proposed government digital identity scheme.

“While the UK uses a range of digital identity services, it does not currently operate a national ID card or single citizen identifier scheme,” says a summary of the digital ID inquiry. “In September 2025, the prime minister announced a new digital ID scheme, with a target to launch by the end of the current Parliament in 2029. In January 2026, it was further announced that digital ID would not be mandatory, but would become one of a number of ways in which people would be able to prove their right to work.”

The PAC brings a measure of skepticism to the new inquiry, having run a previous one in 2019, scrutinizing the GOV.UK Verify digital program. It “found that the system was failing its users, having missed all of its original performance targets. Members of the public using the system were hampered by a catalogue of problems, including difficulty signing up and accessing multiple government services.”

It remains an open question whether or not the UK can successfully avoid those problems this time around in rolling out a new national digital ID scheme. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has already stumbled several times along its path, seeming to switch course on the question of mandatory digital identity for right to work checks when the issue became too heated. The plan for the GOV.UK wallet has caused friction with private digital identity providers certified under the UK’s Digital Verification Services (DVS) trust framework. And there remains a significant amount of distrust in centralized government digital ID among certain subsets of the public and privacy advocates.

High legitimacy hurdle for UK digital identity

A new piece from the Ada Lovelace Institute wrestles with the question of how to build public legitimacy for digital ID in the UK. Authors Octavia Field Reid and Rachel Coldicutt follow a path that will be familiar to those who follow the work of the Association of Digital Verification Professionals (ADVP), exploring how the digital ID debate is unfolding against deeply rooted cultural, social and legal norms.

“Like other common law countries, the UK has no mandatory identification documents and identification is by consent,” they write. “This means that people do not expect to be challenged to prove who they are and do expect to produce documentation only to prove entitlement, e.g. for accessing public services.”

There are nations, goes the argument, where traditions and bygone political hierarchies have made people more accustomed to handing over personal information. (A good example is South Korea, where trust in government and authority is ingrained from centuries of Confucian influence.) But the UK is not one of these nations. While it is not as loudly obsessed with Big Freedom as the U.S., it has a liberal democratic model and a healthy respect for minding one’s own business; it is Keep Calm and Carry On, not “show me your papers.”

So, as the authors put it, “a shift towards digital ID is not a neutral administrative upgrade but a change in the underlying relationship between a person and the state.” And managing that change fairly and effectively has been bungled before.

“Introducing a UK digital ID system comes with a high legitimacy hurdle. To be seen as legitimate and to be trusted, the scheme will need a bounded scope, transparent development and a common understanding of what it is for.” Maintaining a channel for ongoing public input is key: the government’s current digital ID consultation “must signal the beginning for participatory public input rather than the end.” The authors believe “good governance, clear redress mechanisms and meaningful public participation throughout the life of the digital ID programme” as prerequisites for a digital identity system that is legitimate in the public’s eyes.

Fumble on digital ID could erode trust in wider digital transformation

“Trust is hard to build, easily lost and hard to regain,” the authors say. And while the current scheme meets some of the criteria for legitimacy, on others, it falls short. One major problem is that its purpose remains unclear. And if the government intends to cultivate buy-in on digitization in the long term, it’s going to have to be transparent if things aren’t working.

“A wrong step with digital ID will not only damage the scheme itself,” write Coldicutt and Reid. “It also risks precipitating a wider lack of trust in the government’s ability to deliver data-driven and AI-enabled public infrastructure.” (For instance, in health care.)

“We strongly suggest that the government continues to listen carefully to public opinion as it develops its proposals before and after rollout, and is prepared to radically redesign or even shelve proposals if the evidence from the public demands it. Legitimacy has to be earned, not simply announced.”

Article Topics

Ada Lovelace Institute  |  biometrics  |  digital government  |  digital ID  |  DVS Trust Framework  |  identity verification  |  UK digital ID