The UK government has formally added a national digital identity scheme to its legislative agenda, using the King’s Speech 2026 to announce a Digital Access to Services Bill that would create the legal framework for a state-issued digital ID used to access public services.
Reading the speech in Parliament on May 13, the monarch said: “My Ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID that will modernise how citizens interact with public services.” Background briefing notes published alongside the speech describe the Bill as setting out the rules for creating, issuing, storing, and verifying a government digital credential, including eligibility requirements and the data the credential will contain.
The Bill is framed as voluntary, a deliberate contrast with an earlier proposal in autumn 2025 that would have required digital identity checks for right-to-work verification. That plan was withdrawn after pushback from civil liberties groups and Labour backbenchers, and the new framing treats digital ID as an option for accessing public services rather than a mandatory credential for employment.
The legislative move follows a March 2026 decision to build the underlying digital ID platform in-house rather than outsourcing it to a commercial identity provider, with engineering led by government teams. It also comes weeks after the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee opened an inquiry into the digital ID plan’s cost, scope, and rationale, drawing on the history of earlier failed UK identity card programs.
The Bill does not specify the technical architecture, and key questions about how the new credential will interact with the existing GOV.UK One Login service, how biometric data will be handled, and which devices and wallets will support the credential have been left to subsequent secondary legislation and government design work.
Civil liberties opposition remains intense. Big Brother Watch has called the proposal “wholly unBritish” and warned that a federated architecture can still function as a centralized identity system if persistent identifiers are used across services. The group has also pointed to YouGov polling commissioned for its campaign showing that 63 percent of British adults do not trust the government to keep digital ID data secure. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, with 12 partner organizations, wrote to MPs in December 2025 urging the government to abandon a national digital ID scheme on privacy and surveillance grounds.
Sources: UK Government, Big Brother Watch, Cybernews
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By the Mobile ID World Editorial Team
