Digital ID: what’s changed?

It’s been widely reported that the government has “U-turned” on proposals to require mandatory digital ID for Right to Work checks in the UK, less than four months after the plans were first announced.

Various news stories have said that the government has “dropped”, “scrapped” or “abandoned” plans for compulsory digital ID for workers, while some outlets have reported the announcement as the latest in a series of government “U-turns”.

Yet a series of ministers have insisted there will still be mandatory digital checks on the right to work—at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Sir Keir Starmer said: “There will be checks, they will be digital and they will be mandatory.” The chancellor Rachel Reeves also claimed on BBC Breakfast that stories about a U-turn had been “overwritten”, while the Guardian reported that “officials said this was not a U-turn”.

So what’s really going on?

What’s changed - and what hasn’t?

In September the government announced that it was launching a new form of digital ID, and that by the end of this parliament (in 2029) this specific new form of digital ID would be mandatory for Right to Work checks in the UK.

We explained what was being proposed in more detail at the time. The government said the digital ID would “be stored directly on people’s own device—just like contactless payment cards or the NHS App today”, adding: “The new digital ID will be the authoritative proof of who someone is and their residency status in this country.”

Setting out the plans in Parliament, the science, innovation and technology secretary Liz Kendall said in October “our digital ID…will be mandatory for Right to Work checks by the end of the Parliament”.

The government hasn’t published full details of how its policy has now changed, and a government spokesman has reportedly said that details of the digital ID scheme will be set out following a full public consultation which will “launch shortly”. But broadcast interviews with a number of ministers since news of the change in policy broke have given us some understanding of what’s happening.

The government has said it is still proceeding with plans to require some form of digital identification for Right to Work checks in the UK. However crucially it now says that instead of only the new digital ID scheme announced in September being valid for these checks, other forms of digital ID will also be accepted.

In other words, while previously the government had said that its new digital ID scheme would be mandatory for anyone who wanted to pass a Right to Work check by the end of this parliament, that is no longer going to be the case.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves told BBC Breakfast: “We are saying that you will need mandatory digital ID to be able to work in the UK. Now, the difference is whether that will have to be a one piece of ID—a digital ID card—or whether it can be an eVisa or an ePassport, and we’re pretty relaxed about what form that takes.”

Transport secretary Heidi Alexander MP similarly said [2:13:50] “we're absolutely committed to mandatory digital right to work, work checks and that hasn't changed”, adding that the digital ID announced in September “could be one way in which you prove your eligibility to work through a digital right to work check” but that “another type of a digital ID check could be, for example, a biometric chip in a passport”.

A government spokesperson told the BBC: "We are committed to mandatory digital right to work checks.”

We’ve asked the Cabinet Office a series of questions about what the changes reported today mean for the overall scheme—we’ve yet to receive a response but will update this article if we do.