Cabinet office minister Pat McFadden has suggested a digital ID card for every Briton could help to combat illegal immigration and benefit fraud.
The Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East said that the UK was “behind the curve” technologically and could implement a system similar to the Baltic state of Estonia, where its citizens are given a unique identification number.
This allows Estonians to register births, marriages, divorces, deaths, vote, book GP appointments and access their bank accounts.
In an interview with The Times, the senior government minister said that at the moment Britons were asked to prove their identity through “a multiplicity of paper-based documents” but that a digital ID could improve access to services.
The issue of national identity cards was first raised by New Labour and championed by Tony Blair, before the controversial policy fell out of favour by the time the party lost the 2010 election.
Mr McFadden suggested the ID scheme could be used to tackle the surge in small boat crossings and to combat benefit fraud as people would have to prove who they were before taking employment.
France has previously argued that asylum seekers are attracted to the UK because of their ability to find work in the informal economy, in roles such as takeaway delivery drivers or the service industry, despite not being allowed to work upon entry in Britain.
“People shouldn’t be able to come to the UK and work illegally if they don’t have a right to work,” he told The Times. “France has talked about pull factors in the context of the migration debate. If there are pull factors like that, we should deal with them.
“I think there are applications of digital ID to the immigration system, to the benefit system, to a number of areas which can show that we are interested in proper validation of people’s identity, that the people who exercise rights are the people who are entitled to rights, and good value for money for the taxpayer.”
“At the moment, you are meant to do that, but there’s no single mechanism for you to do that. It can be done, as I say, through a number of documents of different kinds.”
Mr McFadden suggested that the discussion on ID cards has since moved on from 15 to 20 years ago, because “the capacity of what we do through smartphones has changed in an unrecognisable way.”
No 10 was originally looking into a “BritCard”, stored onto a smartphone, which would be linked to government records and could check entitlements to benefits and monitor welfare fraud, according to The Times in June.
The proposal for digital ID was endorsed by think tank Labour Together, whose founders include No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
Former MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger also backed calls for digital ID cards to help deter small boat crossings in July, telling BBC Newsnight: “It’s absolutely obvious to me that people should have a digital identity.”
