26 SEPTEMBER 2025 | OPINION
Digital ID cards – the so-called ‘BritCard’ – will be an unmitigated, nationwide disaster. A disaster for the freedom of the British people, but also a disaster in terms of how the scheme will fail to achieve its own stated aims.
Today, the Prime Minister announced his long-rumoured intention to launch the ‘BritCard’: a digital ID system to be stored on all of our phones and verify our right to work and live in Britain.
I will not engage in David Davis-esque libertarian arguments here. Firstly, because all of our very intelligent readers will know what they are. Secondly, because I don’t think that’s the important issue at stake here.
I am personally incredibly skeptical of the Government having access to this kind of thing; however, they already have your passport and all of the data on your phone, if they want it. In principle, I don’t want this, but in practice, if the State wants to screw you over, it just will. Let alone the fact we already provide people with free ID for voting purposes.
It’s also worth noting that we all have NI numbers and NHS numbers already. These are essentially already unique citizen identifiers; if you haven’t got one, you either weren’t born here or haven’t yet reached the age of majority gained residence status here. A far simpler solution would just be to cross-reference with that.
Instead, I think the area where this whole policy falls apart is simply its stated aim – to tackle illegal immigration and off-the-books work by immigrants.
The idea that ‘BritCards’ will tackle illegal immigration is simply ludicrous, if you even scratch the surface of what’s going on abroad. France has digital, and physical, ID cards for every single ‘citoyen’. This has been so for over two decades.
Germany, that bastion of secure borders, also has a nationwide digital ID card. Can you guess how many illegal immigrants were present there in 2024?
The correct answer was 250,000 illegal immigrants – and this obviously just includes those who were actually found, in a nation that is widely known to be harbouring thousands more.
The original idea appears to stem from this paper from Labour Together, dating from June this year. It states that:
“We estimate that it would cost between £140-400m to build the digital right-to-work/right-to-rent credential and integrate it with Home Office’s enforcement strategy. This would include around £10m to upgrade the existing Gov.UK App and rebrand it as the BritCard App, and £10m of improvements to the HMPO and UKVI databases. A credential service would cost around £20m and a verification app and service a further £30m. Coordinating and integrating all this could increase costs slightly, but even allowing for a 50% optimism uplift, the total should not come to more than £150m.
Once built, it would cost around £5-10m per year to administer the system. Costs would depend on design decisions such as how to provide the credential to digitally excluded people. The onboarding costs would taper away over time as the ID-excluded proportion of the population shrinks, and as more new adults are issued with the credential at age 16.”
Hundreds of millions… seriously?! An NI number alone, already assigned at the age of 16, is a unique citizen identifier in itself. And nor does it cost millions to “administer” a system like this, especially when you already have a way of identifying people through existing methods.
The bottom line is this: people who come here illegally break the law, the people who employ them break the law, and neither group will be incentivised by the ‘BritCard’ to stop. In a country where I can genuinely go on Facebook and rent out a Deliveroo account off the books – specifically so I can dodge immigration checks – I don’t have very high hopes for how the Home Office will be vetting people to receive the ‘BritCard’, or how well-enforced this will be.
For the sake of argument, let us assume the ‘BritCard’ detects the several hundred thousand people living and working here contrary to our laws. What on earth will we actually do with them? We do not have the infrastructure, political will, or legal framework for deporting them. Equally, we do not have the prison space. So this will just turn into a permanent Deliveroo tracking map, but for the state – not for you.
The Government’s intentions are nowhere near as pure as they say they are with the introduction of digital ID. Without a doubt, this is being done to appease shadowy Labour puppet-masters such as Sir Tony Blair. But, more importantly, this will neither complicate illegal working/immigration, nor serve as a credible deterrent to smugglers.
These cards achieve none of their aims, apart from opening the door to further oppression by the Government in Britain.
And if like me, you don’t have a smartphone?