When a government launches a public consultation on a major policy, basic information matters. Numbers matter especially. Yet last week's UK government consultation on digital identity left two substantial gaps: it contained no price estimate, and it did not specify how long the government would retain "audit trail" records of ID checks.
The absence is not accidental. The government rejected a £1.8 billion estimate made by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology's permanent secretary telling a parliamentary committee the cost would depend on the outcome of the consultation. Voters deserve better than this evasion. If the government cannot articulate what a policy will cost before consulting on it, the consultation is theatre, not deliberation.
The cost issue reveals a deeper fiscal accountability problem. The Office for Budget Responsibility notes the digital ID initiative carries an "unfunded cost" of £600 million per year, with departments expected to absorb this within existing expenditure limits, though no specific savings have yet been identified. This is not a minor accounting detail. It means real money that might have gone to the NHS, border security, or local services will instead fund this scheme.
The audit trail question speaks to surveillance and privacy. The scheme will initially cover right-to-work checks and possibly vehicle tax, remaining optional after the government abandoned its plan to make digital IDs mandatory for new employees. But the consultation suggests possible future uses for digital ID including applications for help with childcare costs, student loans, benefits, state pensions and bus passes. As those uses expand, the audit trail will record a detailed map of where people go and what they do. Yet the government has not decided how long these records will be kept, or who can access them.
The historical parallel is instructive. When Tony Blair's Labour government introduced ID cards in the 2000s, audit trails had a different purpose: former Home Secretary Charles Clarke argued the move would make life harder for terrorist suspects, writing in a 2005 regulatory impact assessment that "They have to find roundabout ways to stay in hotels, hire cars, buy mobile phones, and generally carry out their activities." That scheme was scrapped at substantial public expense.
Some defenders of digital ID point to Estonia as a model. Estonia offers child benefits to new parents automatically when they register a birth, and uses its digital services to cut bureaucracy for businesses, allowing locals and foreigners with digital ID to establish companies online in a few hours. But there is a critical difference. Estonia's digital identification ecosystem provides Digi-ID in the form of a smart card, Mobile ID via a special SIM to be inserted in a smartphone, and Smart ID as a smartphone application. Users have options. The UK government seems wedded to smartphones, an odd stance given it is simultaneously consulting on restricting under-16s' use of social media delivered mostly through smartphones. Building a digital ID scheme around a technology increasingly blamed for shortening attention spans and worsening mental health in adults, as well as children, looks inconsistent at best.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration. Some analysis estimates the enabling infrastructure would cost around £1 billion to set up and £100 million to run each year, with potential savings including cutting benefit fraud by £1.25 billion a year, as digital ID could reduce this by enabling additional identification and eligibility-verification checks. If those savings materialised, the scheme could be fiscally defensible. But that depends on assumptions about fraud reduction that remain untested and uncosted.
The government has reframed digital ID as less threatening than originally proposed. The mandatory element of the scheme was dropped following political and public backlash; while digital right to work checks will remain mandatory, other documents such as e-passports will be accepted. Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones presented digital ID as a "deeply political" Labour project, walking in the footsteps of the National Health Service, the Open University, and Sure Start centres, supporting equality of access to public services to those with less time and confidence. This framing invokes values that do matter: access and inclusion. Yet it does not answer the spending question.
Strip away the talking points. The fundamental issue is whether parliament and the public can hold government accountable for this spending. Right now, they cannot. The consultation should include a realistic cost estimate. Parliament should require, before voting on legislation later this year, that the government specify precisely how long audit records will be retained and which agencies can access them. These are not technical details to be sorted out later. They are the conditions on which democratic approval should rest.