Digital ID

Debate between Julia Lopez and Allison Gardner

Monday 8th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) for his powerful introduction —he is certainly no tin of beans. He highlighted that this debate has united every party in this Chamber, including the Labour party against the Labour leadership. I commend hon. Members for the powerful contributions that they have made. I have to confess that I disagree with nothing that was said by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins), which is a unique thing—people will fear a coalition again. I even have some admiration for the glorious fence-sitting of some of the Labour MPs who still harbour some ambitions under this Government.

We are here because so many of our fellow citizens are demanding that the Government abandon their dodgy plan for mandatory digital ID. This is one of the best-supported petitions ever—nearly 3 million people are asking, very simply, for their relationship with the state not to be fundamentally rewritten without their consent. At the instigation of no one—apart from, perhaps, Tony Blair—the Prime Minister sprung his sneaky ID scheme on us in September in what by now has become a familiar pattern. A gaping hole emerges in Labour’s handling of an issue—in this case on migration, but it could equally be justice or the economy—at the same time as they are running some kind of personnel meltdown, such as a Deputy Prime Minister ducking tax or a Chancellor leaking a Budget. And voilà: out shoots from Downing Street some cack-handed policy announcement to get us all talking about something else.

Before we know it, we are hurtling toward mandatory ID, fewer jury trials, a horrible menu of new taxes on working people, and, who knows, maybe soon our return to a customs union on whose rules we will have zero say. That is why today we find ourselves debating the imposition of a mandatory ID, despite it being a platform on which no Labour MP in this Chamber was honest enough to stand, and a hapless Minister is left to field questions about the dead cat that his leader just threw on to the table, which is now getting smellier.

[Dr Gardner]

I acknowledge the strength of feeling from the people who signed the petition, but I have a genuine concern that we are not giving the correct level of information for people to say no to. Conflating digital IDs with issues such as jury trials and taxation is doing people no favours; we need to have a calm, rational debate about this one issue so that we can have a reasoned outcome.

[Julia Lopez]

One challenge is that we have had so few of the facts, because this is such a thin plan. The other challenge is that although there are people who support digital identity as a concept, this is about choice and the fact that this Government have no mandate for what they are doing. I do not think that the hon. Member and I are coming from that different a place, in so far as it should be people’s choice whether they have digital identity verification or not. This Government are proposing to rob them of that choice, and that is why the people in this Chamber are united.