Government Spent £15m On Digital ID Before Policy Was Scrapped
3 min read
The government spent around £15m on developing digital ID before the scheme was scrapped by the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
Of that £15m, £800,000 was spent on the “People’s Panel”, which randomly selected 100 people from across the country to contribute to the government’s consultation on the policy. The rest was spent on staff, consultants, design, research and legal advice, internal data seen by PoliticsHome shows.
Burnham announced this week that he was ditching the Keir Starmer policy and rediverting money that would have been spent on it to funding the removal of VAT from energy bills.
The government declined to comment on the figures.
The Starmer ministry had hoped that digital ID would help modernise the state and make public services more efficient.
However, the policy polled poorly when first announced in September, with the then-government's communications strategy partly blamed for the rough landing. Ministers initially focused on how digital ID could help tackle illegal migration, before later pivoting to how it could make everyday tasks easier for the average person. It was hoped internally that the "People's Panel" would help get the public back on side.
The Starmer government then ditched the mandatory element of the scheme, as revealed by PoliticsHome in January, amid concerns that voters would not support the policy in that form.
The new PM's claim that ending digital ID will fund his cost-of-living measure has been questioned by think tanks like the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and Institute for Government (IfG).
Speaking to PoliticsHome this week, the IfG's Heloise Dunlop said it was "not clear how the government was going to fund digital ID: the policy was not yet fully finalised, there was no clear idea what online services would be included in the join-up, and the OBR had said no specific funding had been allocated for digital ID in the spending review".
Burnham has also been criticised from his own side, with Labour MP Darren Jones, who Burnham sacked from Cabinet after entering office, publicly describing the policy as unfunded.
PoliticsHome reported earlier this week that the Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office, Cat Little, had apologised to department officials who had been working on digital ID for not being told about the decision to get rid of it before it was announced.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) previously estimated that the overall cost of introducing the digital ID scheme would be £1.8bn.
PoliticsHome understands that departments were previously asked to find savings to fund the programme.
Julia Lopez, Conservative MP for Hornchurch and Upminster and shadow technology secretary, told PoliticsHome: “Labour blew up work to improve the government’s online services for the sake of Keir Starmer’s mandatory digital ID plan, in the process landing the taxpayer with a £15m bill.
“The Conservatives fought Labour’s uncosted and wrong-headed ID plan every step of the way and got it stopped. Now Andy Burnham rides in to claim the credit and to recycle savings that were never banked in the first place."
