The UK government’s digital ID rollout has been slammed as rushed and damaging to public trust in a parliamentary report released this week.

A report from Parliament's Home Affairs Committee has blasted the government’s rollout of mandatory digital ID under Keir Starmer.

The UK digital ID scheme, which is planned to cost the UK government up to £1.8 billion over the first three years to implement, has been criticised as a costly initiative, with no specific funding identified.

Chair Dame Karen Bradley said the move was “nothing short of a fiasco” and undermined public faith in an otherwise “well-received” policy direction, according to the Telegraph.

The MPs said that the plan came “out of the blue”, and the relevant communications were “completely inadequate”, causing “alarm” and “uncertainty”.

Starmer presented digital ID as a way to crack down on illegal immigration, making it harder for undocumented migrants to secure jobs without a legal right to work. Digital IDs would only be available to UK citizens and legal residents.

But just four months later, following political and public backlash, the government abandoned the compulsory right-to-work checks, now positioning the tool as voluntary and used to access public services.

“The government’s initial announcement of digital ID was rushed, poorly thought through, and failed to articulate convincingly any of the potential benefits,” MPs said.

They added that the rollout undermined existing public support for the technology. Ipsos polling showed that public support for the plans had plummeted by nearly half, to a roughly 32% approval rate. Additionally, almost three million people opposed the plans in a petition.

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Despite the government taking positive steps to improve its policy, these appear badly sequenced since they came after the initial announcement of mandatory digital ID, according to MPs.

“There is still a long way to go to undo the damage of the initial announcement, and the government is yet to demonstrate that it has the capacity to implement a complicated programme of this nature,” they added.

MPs recommended that ensuring the credibility of the programme would require more robust cross-government consultation across the UK, as well as more detailed policy development and public engagement.

The report also warned that the way digital ID cards were handled and subsequent policy changes confirm that the government “has not learnt the lessons from previous failures”.

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