Keir Starmer had an emergency meeting yesterday with his new chief secretary, Darren Jones, and other ministers, to discuss the migration problem. Apparently, one of the things they want to consider further is compulsory digital IDs to crack down on illegal working.
As a Blairite, I know I ought to come over all Professor Higgins and say, “By George, I think he’s got it.” Tony Blair’s institute has been pumping out analyses of how a digital identity database is the solution to everything from welfare reform to school absences.
But I have never really been convinced. When Blair was in Downing Street and the first trundlings of the juggernaut of ID cards became audible, I was always put off by the cost. Indeed, it was on cost grounds that the coalition government cancelled the scheme.
Cost is relative, of course. If an ID scheme could stop the boats now, it would be worth paying billions – although where Rachel Reeves would find yet more money is an ever-more impenetrable mystery.
Getting a grip on immigration is important. It is one of the first duties of the government: to decide who can come to live here and who cannot. If compulsory digital IDs would help, then we should find the money.
But I do not think they would. Employers are already under an obligation to check the ID and immigration status of anyone they employ. The problem, it seems to me, is not ID but enforcement.
Anecdotage is rife about food and shopping delivery riders using other people’s ID to zip around on electric bikes, making life convenient for the rest of us. Robert Jenrick, the hyperactive neighbourhood policing bore, has gone to asylum hotels and pointed at delivery rider bikes parked outside. (Or was that Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, Jenrick’s mini-me? Possibly both of them on different days.)
We know that asylum seekers are not allowed to work while they wait for their application for refugee status to be considered – a wait that now averages more than a year. But we also know that anyone who has actually applied to be allowed to stay in this country has had their identity checked and will have documents that show who they are.
So how does a “compulsory digital ID” help? Most of this stuff is already online. Landlords, who are required to check the immigration status of all would-be tenants, can check paper documents or use the Home Office online service.
Better enforcement is obviously desirable, and maybe some streamlining of existing online systems would make it easier, but to dress this up as a national ID scheme is merely giving a different name to what is already supposed to happen.
And not even better enforcement will stop the boats. Migrants are not crossing the Channel in unseaworthy dinghies in order to work while they wait for their asylum application to be considered. They are making the journey because they think they will be allowed to stay, and they hope to be able to work legally to provide for themselves and their families. They will acquire a digital ID in the process. The mere existence of a digital ID system – which we already have – will not deter them.
So, sorry Tony, and sorry Keir, I do not think that a fancy new expensive ID scheme is the answer.
