82
Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards
(petition.parliament.uk)
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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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I carry my driving licence too, but by choice.
I've been to China. I don't want this place turning into China. You have to use your ID card for everything, from boarding trains to going to museums. And when you're not showing it directly, you're using something else that's linked to it- like digital payments.
And if we're having to present an ID card for the mundane it isn't a stretch to imagine the government having the ability to harvest that information.
Lisa Nandy was just on Sky news and explicitly said that it is optional to carry it. You'd apparently "have an ID" but you don't have to carry it.
I'm not sure what that means for why they need it. Apparently to check work eligibility easily instead of one of several means that are, in her words, "more easily forged".
You could quite easily develop a system like the driving licence check (for when you rent a car, for example, to check your driving status and points) to provide extra information anonymously like age range or work status or whatever you wanted. In fact if we were still in the EU we'd be able to participate in the beta that Spain is spearheading for age verification: https://ageverification.dev/. It's goals are explicitly privacy focused so I'd encourage people to read the details.
As a technology challenge I don't think there's a good argument not to have such a system rather than the patch work one we have now that was designed and built close to hundreds of years ago. However politically selling something like this to British people is always going to be the hard part.
Sounds like she was wrong? I wouldn't really be against a state standard age verification system that's optional.
Hmm 🧐 seems I was suckered into the government propaganda machine. I can't help but think Nandy's comments this morning were calculated to cause confusion in the government's favour.
I completely agree with not wanting the UK to be China.
But I do see these as separate things - the same issues you describe could be done with driving licences, if someone was mad enough to try.
No they can't because we use them for different things. One ID means one system that tracks everything. Also, you don't have to have a passport. You don't have to have a driving license. Everybody needs an NI number to work, but it's not an ID (No photo, DOB, etc).
This is a perfect explanation. They could make a national insurance photocard if they'd like. Maybe have police require that you present it within a timeframe. It's the same with driving- you can drive without your licence photocard in the car, you just have to drop into a police station within two weeks if you haven't presented it when asked.
If you even had National Insurance photocards with just the number and a picture, you could just have the employers store them on premise.
No it won't work. Plenty of people don't have driving licences. This would systemically exclude many blind and disabled from participating in society. Driving licence photocards don't even have any chips in them, nor a machine-readable zone.