UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/28/digital_id_cost/
Posted by megaweb
UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/28/digital_id_cost/
Posted by megaweb
35 Comments
Brother ffs just make national insurance an actual card you can print or have on your phone. There. Solved. Wtf else you need???
Edit: A commenter below makes a good point re identity theft risk.
If it’s going to £1.8B it’s really going to cost at least £3B.
As always, too skint to lift people out of poverty, or nationalise / invest in infrastructure, but plenty of money for the surveillance state.
That actually sounds pretty cheap. Almost suspiciously so.
Might want to update that to ‘priceless’; which is going to be on the the face of Labour MPs when they are ejected from governance in every consituency for this tyrannical farce.
The Blair’s are laughing all the way to the bank. Tony has wanted this level of govt control for decades, and his son becomes even richer off the back of it. Ching ching, a very happy Xmas for the Blair family.
The big 4 are salivating at the thought of this being signed off
Not worth it. We already have so many IDs , so many digital wallets. Just reuse.
They still can’t answer how this relates to illegal workers who by the very nature of “illegal” working setups, do not follow standard hiring rules around ID / onboarding etc.
You implement a digital ID, then what? If I’m in the business of employing illegally..I just don’t require digital ID……if these lot had a brain they’d be even more dangerous.
They’ll claw it back when they sell the data and pretend it has been leaked or stolen
I mean, we *could* spend £1.8b on that or we could buy:
90,000 dialysis machines to help people waiting for kidney transplants or
60,000 advanced incubators for newborn babies or
6,800 ECMO machines or
600 top of the range MRI machines or if health care isn’t interesting enough we could fill 42,900 potholes.
The list goes on and on. If there is £1.8 billion sat around somewhere waiting to be spent then there’s better things to spend it on.
And which private company is getting the contract that’s linked to someone’s sister or cousin?
I had to do a double take, the B read like an 8 at first on my screen.
In struggle to understand how it will cost that much. In an actually pro digital ID, but at that cost there are more fundamental problems about delivery that need to be tackled first.
I just want a fucking official piece of plastic that says I am a real citizen to access public services and prove my identity. This whole project is Orwellian bullshit of the highest degree…
Wouldn’t it be so much better to spend this on improving railways instead?
So about £26 per resident, not sure if that’s good value for such a system and I guess long term its an “issue” solved that wont need to be revisited. I’m just not quite sure of what value it will bring at this exact moment when we’re in the hole financially. I’m not anti digital ID I’m just struggling to see the cost to value for a typical Brit.
I mean if this gets those private identity proving companies for stuff like Reddit and discord out the picture I might like that. However it’s a bit creating a problem to then have to solve it, to great a big brother state.
I don’t want to provide reddit with my identity, but I don’t mind someone third party holding that info that can be unsealed under court order.
Someone member of labour or their mate must be in line to benefit as this is such a weird change considering how hard they objected to just requiring ID to vote and now they are in full support for required ID for just existing very strange
Their biggest decision will be on which friends and family to overpay to under deliver.
Why the fuck are we outsourcing any of this. This is national infrastructure, we need a “digital department” that builds and maintains these systems. Same can be said for the NhS digital transformation, national rail ticketing, making tax digital… same can be said for our rail infrastructure, roads, these should all be government departments. Our civil service have just become glorified procurement managers who don’t understand the problems they’re solving while getting ripped off again and again by the private sector. We could even take on private contracts to generate revenue.
The government should only be allowed to contract out short term projects and only a small number of times before they need to bring it in house.
Edit:
I say ‘why the fuck are we outsourcing this’ as based on their track record of outsourcing key digital infrastructure they probably will do.
Never get how these things cost so much. That’s the equivalent of three thousand highly paid staff working on it full time for six years.
I’d be fine with this, if the government commits to building an in-house engineering team for this problem instead of giving it to one of the WITCH companies. This would employ a ton of highly-skilled staff that’d happily build this over several years, then move on once delivered to other internal projects or companies.
Although let’s be blunt, this price was already agreed, and the tender is a formality for the group that’s already getting the contract.
I have a friend who is a hobbyist app developer and could do it on his spare time and make something no doubt more user friendly and more secure than what they’ll end up releasing…
People are raging about the child benefit lift but absolute crickets over this. It’s going to be a huge flop anyway, no one’s going to do it and it will be as badly enforced as the TV licence
I don’t trust the state with this, when is the last time a government project in the billions actually met target?
They will use this to monitor the media I consume. They’ll make products and services require providing ID then you’re not that far away from being turned away at filling stations or Tesco for consuming too much petrol or red meat.
Then you’ll also need to provide ID to be at a protest the state knows everything about the people on the left and right who attend these things. The ringleaders spending habits and kinks totally wouldn’t get leaked to the press to discredit them…
This all sounds like farfetched nonsense but the technology exists to do all of these things and I think we all know the state is more interesting in controlling us than our well being.
They’ve already made us less safe with the Online Safety Act by forcing us to have to give a form of our likeness or ID to American companies to continue to use them who don’t give a crap about GDPR. There are ten of thousands of our IDs sat in American data centers being used and trained on.
1.8 billion for a scheme nobody wants, which will save no money in the long run and money that could be better spent. Like Defence.
£1.8B on something that isn’t really needed. Could say spend that money on NHS, public transport, housing.
Nope they’d rather waste it on something that will not help anyone. People who are employing and working illegally tend to pay cash so there is no record. No need to ID anyone if they don’t exist on paper.
At least all that money will go back into the hands of UK citizens… right?
Yet another waste of money.
Could easily pass a law that says you must carry id.
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea needs to give their heads a wobble
That’s £1.8 billion that could have gone to the police to actually help kids through combating gangs and making the streets safer.
So, is anybody on here not going to be using it? I sure won’t.
I’m not going to pay that for one card!! Rediculous….
So if I have a photo drivers license and a photo ID passport, will I also need to get a Digital ID?