By Henry Griffiths, Third year, Philosophy
On the 26th of September 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer confirmed the details of a new digital ID scheme. Primarily framed to tackling illegal immigration, he claimed, ‘Digital ID is another measure to make it tougher to work illegally here, making our borders more secure’. The government also insists the system will streamline identity checks and reduce wait times for services.
Yet with this change comes a deeper implication: the rekindling of a historically contentious debate over civil liberties in the UK. In 1952, wartime ID’s were abolished amid concerns over government intrusion. In the 2000’s, Tony Blair’s government proposed biometric ID cards, only to scrap them following fierce public opposition. And now we have a technology-driven ID scheme bringing forth issues old and new.
Starmer insists that the new digital ID will be different. He emphasises there will be no centralised data base, hoping to dispel fears around data security, but no matter his rhetoric, the scheme marks a step towards an infrastructure of surveillance. And is it truly voluntary? Citizens may not be required to ‘carry’ the ID, nor will police ask them to produce it, but digital ID’s will be mandatory for right-to-work checks. This makes them unavoidable for anyone seeking employment. Students entering graduate jobs will have to use it, landlords may demand it, and there is no guarantee it will not become the default way to access a host of public services in the future.
‘A voluntary scheme that you can’t live without isn’t voluntary at all’
Public opposition has been immense. The petition against the introduction of digital ID’s has garnered over 2.9 million signatures to date, making it one of the largest petitions in UK history and triggering a parliamentary debate this December. Civil liberties organisations such as Liberty and Big Brother Watch argue that the scheme is one step towards a ‘checkpoint society’, one where the identity of ordinary citizens is constantly probed and monitored.
For students, this feels uncomfortably familiar. The constant scanning of ID’s cards to enter buildings and access university services is a normal, monotonous part of student life. To add government-issued ID’s into this mix would create a life of inescapable verification for students.
Maud Humphries
Still, much of the national debate has centred around the implications for older people or those without smartphones. Perhaps for the tech-savvy student this won’t feel like such a dramatic change. Everything is digital now, from online banking to signing into lectures, so why not ID’s?
A recent UoB poll tells a different story. Collecting in-person data from friends and those in and around Senate House, I asked 70 Bristol students whether they thought negatively or positively about the new scheme. 61 per cent expressed concerns, with many citing mistrust over data use as their primary reason. And one student captured a particularly important sentiment: 'it’s not about what it [the scheme] means now, but what it might mean in the future. While the impetus behind the digital ID is to prevent illegal work, submitting to such a system would create a precedent that could easily change, expanding– as technology tends to do – into other areas of our life.
‘It’s not about what it means now, but what it might mean in the future’
For a government that desperately needs to rebuild public confidence (in 2023, only 27 per cent of people reported high or moderately high trust in the national government), pushing through a nationwide digital ID scheme seems the worst way to go about it. It threatens to wear the boundary between convenience and control, asking us to surrender our privacy when it should be protected.
Featured Image: Unsplash / Onur Binay
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