Digital ID can save government tens of billions of pounds each year by replacing expensive legacy paper-based systems, according to Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister.
Launching a consultation on the introduction of Digital ID on Tuesday, Jones said the reform will build the foundations for modern public services.
He said Digital ID – which will be free, not compulsory and built in house – will enable a transformation from a “legacy of call centres, paperwork and the need to tell your story multiple times to different parts of government, with hours on hold and not knowing where you are in the process” to “a truly modern Britain where public services work for you when you need them”.
"Because of a whole load of problems in the way that government works and collaborates together”, Jones said he cannot think of many public services that are currently “good enough in terms of the customer experience when you compare that with the private sector”. He put forward the Passport Office and driving licence system as two of the few areas that cut the mustard.
"Supermarkets, banks and shops have all chosen to move their services online because it delivers a better customer experience and value for money, and other countries like Estonia fully digitised public services years ago," Jones said. "We need to catch up."
He added: “That's not to undermine the hard work that public officials and civil servants do and they try really hard, but we have to enable them to make better services, and building these modern digital foundations will allow them to do that in the future."
Jones said Britain is “quite far behind internationally” on building modern public services. As well as Estonia, Jones said Singapore, Australia, Belgium and Denmark are “vastly ahead of us”.
“So we can learn a lot from them about how to build this system and by doing it in-house, we can work with our intelligence agencies to make sure that we're at the cutting edge of that,” he said.
Jones said previous government estimates suggested “that if we’re able to digitise lots of these customer services, we can save tens and tens of billions of pounds a year that is currently going on very unproductive call centres, lots of paper shuffling, slow processes”.
Pointing out some of the areas where savings could be made, Jones noted that the DVLA currently processes 45,000 letters each day, Defra uses 500 different paper forms, and HMRC handles over 100,000 phone calls a day.
He said digitising services like these could free up money for other priorities like the NHS, or return money to taxpayers “because we’ve made public services cheaper to run”.
Consultation includes People's Panel 'gamble'
An initial eight-week public consultation is seeking feedback on how to build a system that is useful for the public, finishing on 5 May.
This will be followed by a new type of consultation: a "People’s Panel for Digital ID" – an in-depth deliberative engagement process with a broadly UK-representative sample of 100-120 individuals to discuss the policy in detail. Individuals will be selected through sortition (civic lottery) and this process will conclude on 21 June, ending the formal consultation process.
Jones admitted that this is a "gamble" as "they get to vote at the end of it, to decide whether they like it or not, or what conditions they put around it, and I've made it a legal part of the government's consultation, and that's never been done before, because in many ways you're giving up control".
But the minister said he hopes this will result in members of the public "thinking that they have more say, more power, more access, to how these decisions are being made".
Legislation to implement digital ID is expected to be put before parliament later this year, with work on the app to begin in 2027.
Jones said the NHS App will not link up with Digital ID, but all other customer-facing government services have the potential to become part of the app.
By the end of this parliament, Jones said the app should include services such as tax disc payments and right to work checks, while services like childcare, pension statements and HMRC data are "really a prize for the next parliament".
Jones also said he expects to build in a mechanism which means that all future governments will have to go back to parliament for approval for each new service that comes onto the app in the future.