One of Andy Burnham's first acts as prime minister is a cancellation. The digital identity scheme known as BritCard, announced last September, will not go ahead.
The money is being moved rather than saved. Al Jazeera reports the programme was estimated to cost the equivalent of about $2.4bn over three years, and that the funds will be redirected toward helping with the cost of living.
What BritCard was
The scheme would have required every UK resident to hold a government-backed digital identity.
Its first use was to have been right-to-work checks: an employer confirming, digitally and against a central government record, that a person is entitled to work in the United Kingdom. That was the initial application rather than the limit of the design, which is the point on which most of the argument turned.
Opposition was substantial and measurable. A parliamentary petition against the scheme gathered close to three million signatures, which puts it among the largest such petitions the UK has seen.
Why some people wanted it
The case for a national digital ID is not trivial, and it is worth stating properly rather than as a foil.
The Tony Blair Institute, whose director Alexander Iosad is quoted in Al Jazeera's report, has argued that a digital ID is long overdue for Britain, which is unusual among comparable countries in having no national identity document.
The organisation Labour Together made a different argument: that a national digital identity could end what it called "identity exclusion," the situation of people, particularly those with uncertain immigration status, who struggle to prove who they are and are shut out of services as a result. On that reading, a universal scheme protects the people currently least able to document themselves.
Why others opposed it
The objections split into two distinct kinds, and conflating them muddles the debate.
The first is about privacy and scope. Alan Miller, a co-founder of the campaign group Together, welcomed the cancellation but said "our work is not done," warning of the risk of "de facto digital ID through creeping expansion" — the concern that a system introduced for one narrow purpose accumulates others until it becomes compulsory in practice without ever being made compulsory in law.
The second objection is practical, and it comes from a different direction. Elizabeth Anderson, chief executive of the Digital Poverty Alliance, has pointed out that 19 million British adults are digitally excluded, and that one in five adults need help using online government services.
That is the harder problem with the policy. A digital identity requirement attached to the right to work would have made a smartphone and a working relationship with online government a practical precondition of employment. For several million people, that is a barrier rather than a convenience.
What the decision actually settles
Less than it appears.
Cancelling BritCard removes a specific scheme with a specific timetable. It does not resolve the underlying question, which is how a state verifies identity in a society that increasingly conducts everything online, and every UK government of the past two decades has run into some version of it.
The previous Labour government introduced identity cards in the 2000s; the coalition scrapped them in 2010. Britain has now abandoned a national identity scheme twice in twenty years, and the reasons have been broadly the same both times.
The redirection of the funds is also worth watching rather than accepting at face value. Money announced for one purpose and reallocated to another is a common political manoeuvre, and whether the cost-of-living measures Burnham has promised this week actually amount to the sum described is a question that can only be answered when the measures are published.
