LONDON — Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has doubled down on his call for Britain to embrace digital IDs — while acknowledging that public skepticism would have to be overcome first.
Speaking at a conference hosted by his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) in central London on Tuesday, Blair said introducing digital IDs could improve citizens’ access to public services while clamping down on benefit fraud and illegal migration.
But he admitted that there would be “a little work in persuading to do here, it must be said.”
Blair’s suggestion is already causing a headache for the U.K.’s new Labour government, where he retains considerable influence. His attempts to introduce compulsory ID cards while prime minister were deeply unpopular — and ultimately scrapped under the Coalition government.
After Blair argued that “we should move as the world is moving to digital ID” as a way to “control immigration,” ensuring “we know precisely who has a right to be here” in a Sunday Times article this week, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds appeared to rule it out over the weekend.
However, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has said he wants to make it easier for people to access public services using a single log-in as part of his ambition to harness technology to improve how people interact with the state.
“Right now, the priority when it comes to accessing digital services or online services or services per se is actually about verification,” Kyle told ITV’s Peston on Monday. “ID cards conjure images of a universal service that affects everybody online and offline and everywhere else.”
Director for government innovation at the TBI, Jeegar Kakkad, told POLITICO the ideas have been misunderstood, and that the organization is not advocating for mandatory digital ID cards.
“Everyone loves to talk about ID cards or government ID. That’s not actually our proposal,” Kakkad said, noting that TBI’s vision is for people to be given “the ability to connect [their] data across the public sector.”
The organization argues that countries including Italy, Estonia and India have already created similar systems. However, it’s not clear how a non-mandatory system would help control illegal immigration.
In his speech on Tuesday, Blair said embracing artificial intelligence was the “only … game-changer” in addressing Britain’s current economic malaise.
Blair said public sector embrace of AI would save a fifth of workforce time, while investing in “AI-enabled education,” can “raise educational attainment and boost GDP by 6 per cent in the long term.”
A paper published by the TBI on Tuesday said adopting AI in the public sector could save taxpayers £10 billion per year by the end of the current parliament, while AI-driven growth in the private sector could “offset all the extra fiscal pressure facing the UK up to 2040.” Digital IDs alone would save £2 billion a year by reducing fraud and increasing efficiency, it said.
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