Digital ID: Empowering Citizens and Transforming Public Services

At the heart of this government’s central missions is a desire to reform, and transform, the British state – empowering the citizen, offering greater choice and accessibility, and ensuring the state is more strategic and efficient. Digital ID must be wholeheartedly embraced if we are to be successful in this endeavour.

Digital ID would allow the unlocking of the power of data to personalise public services. Every interaction we have – whether it’s turning up at A&E or passing an exam – tells us something about the citizen’s needs, interests and character. To harness this carefully would allow us to offer a more tailored, efficient and personal experience within our public services.

More broadly, it is a key route to fixing the state and a powerful tool in Labour’s missions: moving health from treatment to prevention, breaking the link between geography and quality in education, ensuring our benefits and taxation system is fairer and support more targeted, securing our borders by quickening processing times and supercharging innovation in the private sector to unlock growth.

Whilst ID cards were a policy and political nightmare of the noughties and the past, digital ID must be harnessed now for the future. Innovative new approaches can better our national security, border control, crime prevention, and embrace artificial intelligence and assist with public service reform.

A theme of the last Labour government was internal questions as to whether it should embrace national ID cards (a very different proposition to digital ID). Ultimately, very little progress was made. Whilst the government passed the Identity Cards Act 2006, after the Commons played ping-pong with an obstructive House of Lords, the pressures of increased costs and civil liberty concerns meant that only a few foreign nationals ever received identity cards before the scheme was scrapped by the Coalition government in 2011.

A whole thesis can be written about the policy failings of ID cards. But fundamentally, the government had not answered the question as to why they were necessary – either to tackle a specific mischief or to support a broader, strategic aim.

New Labour opposed ID cards in 1997 (whilst the idea was in the equivalent Tory manifesto), but after 9/11, and the launch of the ‘war on terror’, they re-emerged. As the scheme became more complex, and under fire from those concerned about civil liberties, other reasoning was offered. They became a tool for managing immigration, and then a form of simple ID for the purchasing of alcohol (described as ‘convenient’ by a Home Office Minister).

In a moment that could have been from the ‘Thick of It’, at an event to promote ID cards in 2009, the relevant minister had left her own at home, much to the enjoyment of the assembled media.

Much of the reasoning offered then was negative – to prevent terrorists entering the country, to stop children from purchasing alcohol, and to curb illegal migration. These are all legitimate policy aims, but there was no immediate positive advantage from a new approach and certainly no underlying strategy.

Now, the terrain is very different.

Firstly, new ways of harnessing personal data (ID) are already incredibly advanced in the private sector. Many of the historic arguments from the civil liberty lobby are simply not credible any more. Of course, oversight and protections are necessary, but citizens are already sharing more about themselves than ever before. Indeed, evidence from abroad suggests that empowering citizens through a wholesale, centralised introduction of digital ID (with protective oversight) greater protects our privacy. The status quo is messy and complex, whereas one straightforward portal, or access point, such as in Estonia, would allow citizens to know everything their data was accessed and used for.

Secondly, our public services are archaic and crippled in the face of the complex challenges we face. The need for reform is more urgent than ever. Whether it is on immigration, the NHS, policing, or courts, across the public realm there is a sense that old infrastructure is overwhelmed. Sticking plasters won’t work. We need to think big and strategically.

Thirdly, it is already happening. The government are already expanding the verification service for government services and to assist in the private sector, such as setting up a bank account. A piecemeal approach is naturally developing in any event because new ID technology is an obvious solution to many policy issues.

But the government should not accept bit-by-bit reform and instead embrace transformation in this area. There are currently around 200 different ways people can set up accounts to interact with local and national government. This is cumbersome and inefficient for the service user and provider.

As part of a decade of national renewal, the government should adopt a more ambitious approach. A single point of access would empower the citizen to take decisions as to the services they use, or not. It would allow the state to better personalise services, act to prevent harm rather than pick up the pieces, and be more strategic in planning for the future. It would also place the British state in a better position to benefit from developments in AI.

Consider the student whose new course could be tailored by artificial intelligence on the basis of their educational journey to date. The patient, with complex medical conditions, navigating an often siloed-NHS. The person attempting to grapple with the overly complex tax or benefit system.

And consider how the state could be more effective as a result of new insights. In the education sector, journeys from pre-school to graduation could be monitored for best results (both academic, but more generally too). Our NHS would receive new insights to inform preventative public health initiatives. The police would have a better sense of patterns in crime and anti-social behaviour. Our immigration system, so dependent on paper and an array of documentation, transformed into a single system of identification and evidence.

The truth is that we do not have any choice. The use of digital ID is already happening at a rapid pace in the private sector and if there is a total mismatch between public services and in the wider economy, support for our NHS, police and education, for example, risk being fundamentally undermined. The state must be responsive to its citizens or face redundancy.

Digital ID can be politically powerful too and fits in with the wider agenda for Labour. Many people feel distant from power, without control over the services they rely upon. They worry about an immigration system which is out of control and the sense that law and order is a notion from a by-gone era. They do not feel government, whether national or local, is reflective of their needs, their values or their priorities. Empowering citizens is a means by which to help confront this underlying challenge.

The Prime Minister rightly talks about fixing the foundations as part of a decade of national renewal. This is the overarching mission of the Labour government. There are few better strategic choices at the outset than embracing technological change – which is happening whether we like it or not – and remodelling how we interact with our public services to take advantage. Fixing the foundations means to empower citizens and transform the state.

 

To read more on how Labour can harness technology for a decade of national renewal, see ‘Realising the potential of everyday AI’.

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