We spoke to Tom Swarbrick of LBC about the UK government’s proposals for digital ID.
Tom Swarbrick: I’m at a loss to understand what this is for, this digital ID. What is it designed to do? In effect, what this will turn into is an app that links you to various bits of the state. And that might be useful. But it’s not digital ID; it’s not even ID, it’s just digital. What is this for? And do we need it? Because an awful lot of money is about to be spent on making this happen. 0345 60 60 973. Iain Corby joins us, Executive Director of the Age Verification Providers Association, who’s been involved with the development of digital ID in the UK. Thanks for coming on, Iain. Is this odd to you, that it wouldn’t include this bit of data?
Iain Corby: Look, it’s even worse than you’ve described.
Tom Swarbrick: Oh, great.
*Iain Corby: So, I’m sitting here with my digital ID. I got it completely free from a company called Yoti. It already exists. It can prove I’m over 18; it can allow me to go and open up a bank account, to take out a mortgage. It can prove my right to work if the government allowed Yoti to get access to a database that just confirms who has a right to work in this country—whether that’s the visa database or National Insurance number.
What’s more, the government—I think it’s about the third piece of legislation this government passed—was the Data Use and Access Bill, which put all these digital IDs on a statutory basis. So there’s now already a legal basis for them to exist. About 50 companies have invested a bucketload of money in creating these digital IDs and being certified by the government against a very rigorous standard which covers things like security, data, and privacy and so on.
And now we’re all a bit, sort of, bamboozled, really, when the government said, “Hey guys, we’re now going to build our own.” It’s like, why? We’ve just been doing this. We’ve got it, and it’s ready to go.
And on the specific point you’re discussing today, in the world of a choice of private sector organizations, you could choose which ID you have and you choose what data you want to keep on there. So if you want to add your GCSE results, you can put them on there and prove those to an employer. Likewise, if you felt it necessary to prove your sex—I don’t know, perhaps you’re competing in professional sports or something and you need to have that piece of proof—then you could choose to add that to your digital ID as well.
But the government’s got itself now in a complete tangle. I can’t imagine the Treasury is particularly impressed at this idea of, effectively, spending billions—and it will be. It’s not just the cost of building it; you’ve got to run it, and you’ve got to answer the phone when people can’t use it, and you’ve got to help all the companies that need to read these IDs figure out how to read them.
And then, of course, you’ve got the question of surveillance. When you’re choosing from one of 50 private sector companies, you can choose one you trust not to be tracking you every time you use your ID. I’m sure there are plenty of people in this country who are quite nervous that it might be irresistible for the government just to make that small tweak to allow the security services to keep an eye on what we’re doing and where we’re doing it, in the interests of keeping us safe—which is something ministers can never say no to.
Tom Swarbrick: There’s also—as ministers now talk about it—the idea that this, quote, “digital ID” will link together different bits of government, whether it’s the Passport Office or the DVLA or HMRC. It’s a kind of one-stop shop to access bits of the state. Now, that might be very useful. That might be very, very helpful indeed. You might want an app that does that. But it isn’t digital ID. So, what is it?
Iain Corby: Well, actually, it wasn’t so long ago that keeping these bits of government separate was actually quite deliberate. And it was a fairly fundamental piece of public policy that we didn’t allow, you know, the taxman to go digging around in your health records and so on and back and forth like that, because it was felt that that was overreach.
So maybe we have moved on. Obviously, the government’s trying to make the case that they should be able to tie up all this data together and make our lives easier. But it’d probably help the government out a lot more as well. So, I much prefer the option that I’m in control of my data, I keep it on my phone, I decide who I share it with and when I share it, and it’s not something that I have to go and ask the government for.
Tom Swarbrick: So you’re clear, Ian, that there are already privately available, downloadable forms of identity verification that exist out there already, and that the state doesn’t need to build its own?
Iain Corby: Yes. And the state has done, quite appropriately—you know, it’s created the standards for that. There’s a certification process. There are independent auditors who check that. There is the Office of Digital Identities and Attributes which has been created within the government DSIT department, which is there to supervise all of that.
And now, suddenly coming in from left field is this idea that “Oh, we’ve got to build it ourselves. It can’t possibly be good enough if it’s not built by the government.” They also sort of claim they’re going to build it in-house and they’re not going to give big contracts to sort of massive tech companies. I’m not really sure how they propose to do that. Are they just—I mean, are they “vibecoding” it using a bit of ChatGPT? I don’t know.
You know, we have some real deep experts in this country out there in the private sector who’ve worked very hard to make this, you know, highly accurate and secure and private. When you get rid of all of that, and you stop all that innovation, and you remove all that private sector investment, you’re just reliant on the digital identity department within government to get everything right. And I don’t think that’s the best way forward.
Tom Swarbrick: Massively appreciate your time. Thank you for coming on. Ian Corby is Executive Director of the Age Verification Providers Association.