In May, we responded to the government’s consultation on a national digital ID, arguing against building it as a central register of citizens’ personal data. This week the incoming government scrapped the scheme, known as BritCard. We are glad that the plans for a national digital ID were scrapped, and we hope our response was part of the conversation that led there.
Our position is straightforward. A mandatory national ID that pools every resident’s name, date of birth, nationality, and residency status into one system is surveillance infrastructure, whatever the stated intention behind it. Britain was right to walk away from this plan. But the discussion about digital identity won’t disappear completely now, and if a future government revisits digital identity, it should build a private system for its citizens.
Britain has done this before
This is the third time Britain has walked up to a national identity system and then away from it. The wartime identity card, introduced in 1939 and meant to last only as long as the war, had by 1950 crept into everything from medical treatment to Post Office withdrawals. When Clarence Willcock refused to produce his for a police officer, the Lord Chief Justice noted that the Act ‘was passed for security purposes; it was never passed for the purposes for which it is now apparently being used.’ Churchill scrapped the cards in 1952 to ‘set the people free.’
Tony Blair’s government passed fresh ID card legislation in 2006. The coalition repealed it in 2011, before it took hold. Each time, the same instinct arrives dressed in the language of emergency, and each time it is abandoned once the public sees what it would cost them.
The problem has not gone away
Scrapping the card does not remove the need it was meant to address. The government remains committed to its crackdown on illegal working. Right-to-work checks stay mandatory for every employer, and new legislation is expected to extend them to the gig economy. Age verification, sanctions screening, and know-your-customer checks keep spreading across the economy. Every one is the same question: how do you prove a fact about yourself without handing over your whole identity?
There is also a quieter risk. The UK already runs credential-based systems for things like accessing healthcare. None of these is a national ID, but the building blocks are there, and it would be easy for a future government to knit them together into one by default rather than by decision. Our recommendations apply to those existing systems just as much: whatever data they hold, and however they are joined up, privacy has to be built in rather than promised.
It can be done privately
Zero-knowledge proofs let a citizen prove a specific fact without disclosing any underlying personal data. Proving you have the right to work in the UK, or that you are over 18, does not require revealing your date of birth, your nationality, or your name. The proof is generated on your own device, and nothing else is transmitted.
None of this needs to be built from scratch. The ICAO 9303 standard already underpins e-passport gates in more than 150 countries. ZKPassport, which Aztec Labs acquired in May 2026, reads the NFC chip already built into passports and national ID cards, verifies the issuing government’s signature, and generates a proof that cannot be forged or shared. An age verification component in one of the European Union’s Digital Identity Wallet implementations is built with Noir, the open-source zero-knowledge language developed by Aztec Labs, alongside open-source circuits from ZKPassport. The technology is production-ready, and it is built in Britain.
If Britain builds this again
While we have real concerns about a national digital identity system, if one is built there are ways to make it useful and operational without creating surveillance infrastructure. Estonia runs one without becoming a surveillance state, and the digital signatures it enables save it an estimated 2 percent of GDP each year. What makes Estonia work is its architecture. When a future government revisits this, and one will, we would ask it to start from four principles.
- Make privacy a structural decision. Personal data that is never collected cannot be misused, breached, or quietly repurposed by a later government.
- Keep it optional and citizen-controlled. People should generate proofs on their own devices, not be enrolled into a central register.
- Build on existing standards. Use the passport and ID infrastructure that already exists, and let citizens hold credentials in certified wallets of their own choosing rather than a single government one.
- Publish the circuits. The cryptographic circuits should be open-source and independently audited, so the public can verify mathematically that the system does only what it claims.
Churchill said scrapping the last national card would set the people free. Britain has now made that choice three times over. It should not need a fourth. Read our full response to the consultation.