Britain can’t shelve Digital IDs forever

So Andy Burnham's decision to pause is understandable, as long as he doesn’t close the door on the scheme for good.

With the Online Safety Act now in full force, and the under-16 social media ban progressing steadily, putting off a centralised identity system indefinitely spells a bigger headache for online access.

The verification industry is capable of keeping those services running, for now. Ofcom counted more than 69 million age checks across a sample of just 32 services from July to December last year, mostly carried out by private companies. But what we can’t build alone is a common standard.

Every organisation running face scans and document verification checks is doing it in a slightly different way, effectively building its own record of who you are, valid only within its own system.

Imagine that, instead of NHS numbers, every hospital, GP and pharmacy issued its own patient ID. You could still get treated, but nothing would be passed between them, and you'd start from scratch at every front desk. That's how digital identity works today.

Today, the "patchwork" approach is manageable, but the industry is straining under a massive uptick in identity fraud that threatens to outpace it. Last year, ID cards accounted for 72% of fraudulent documents detected worldwide, while sophisticated, multi-layered AI fraud rose by 180%.

AI transforms would-be fraudsters into capable actors, and their experimentation is advancing fraud faster than the systems designed to stop it. Criminals no longer need to rely on crude forgeries when they can generate a picture-perfect fake in seconds. With a handful of deepfakes and a few bots at their disposal, they can orchestrate widespread, high-impact scams with minimal tech know-how.

The infrastructure built for the Online Safety Act is a good step forward, but it’s not foolproof. Its age checks have inspired a variety of bypasses, from VPN use to images of video game characters that fooled facial age estimation tools within hours of the rules going live. Verification providers can plug these gaps as they appear, but keeping ahead becomes difficult when every organisation is trying to solve the problem independently.

That doesn't mean the BritCard is the only answer, but it’s one of the more viable ones. Device-based age assurance, where your phone confirms your age without sharing your identity every time you visit a website, is another promising approach that deserves consideration. But it answers only for age, not accounting for who you are, whether you're a real person at all, or what you're entitled to access. A government-backed digital identity would confirm age, identity and eligibility in a single check, recognised across banking, platforms and public services alike.

Identity (not just age assurance) works best when people can rely on a single trusted system - at the least, it would stop us needing to constantly upload selfies and pictures of our passports for every new service. Not to mention, fragmentation creates more opportunities for fraudsters: they only need to fool the least protected provider to get through, and every separate database of identity documents is one more target to breach.

Digital ID doesn't have to mean one giant database of everyone's documents. Done well, it’s just one trusted standard held on your own device, where you verify once, share only what a service strictly needs, and stay in control of your own data.

Fraudsters will keep pace with AI whatever we do, but abandoning Digital ID permanently would leave our defences to evolve as fifty separate systems rather than one strong standard.

The Digital ID scheme we had wasn’t perfect, but it was progress. To concede that work permanently to a fast-maturing fraud industry, rather than rebuilding it better, means leaving consumers and businesses with one fewer defence against the next generation of deepfake scams.

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Kat Cloud is Head of Government Relations at full-cycle verification platform Sumsub.

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