UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is laying the groundwork for a much more expansive digital ID system, just two weeks after confirming it would be mandatory for certain use cases.
During a recent trip to India, Starmer met with Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys and the key architect of Aadhaar, India’s nationwide biometric ID program.
Following that meeting, Starmer praised the role digital ID plays in India’s financial infrastructure and suggested similar uses could be explored in the UK.
Starmer said he and Nilekani discussed “the benefits that it has brought in India” and “the speed with which it allows citizens here to access services, particularly financial services.”
Downing Street later described the meeting as a fact-finding effort and denied it marked the beginning of any formal agreement.
The Prime Minister went on to suggest that digital ID in the UK could eventually serve multiple purposes beyond employment checks. Among the possible applications he mentioned were enrolling children in school and using the ID as a “passport.”
He pointed to the widespread use of Aadhaar in India, stating that it had been adopted “on a voluntary basis in huge numbers, not least because it means that you can access your own money and make payments so much more easily than is available with others.”
While Aadhaar is officially voluntary, it is widely required in practice, effectively making it necessary to function within Indian society.
Starmer also held up Estonia’s digital ID system as a success story, saying, “You can see from Estonia the speed with which people can access services that are available to them, which has been transformational, and there’s great enthusiasm in Estonia for it.”
More: Tony Blair praises Estonia for its digital ID system, where babies are given a digital ID at birth
Both India and Estonia have faced serious privacy and security issues with their national ID systems.
Aadhaar has been tied to multiple data breaches and has drawn criticism for its role in excluding people from essential services.
In Estonia, a major security flaw in 2017 led to the cancellation and reissuance of hundreds of thousands of ID cards.
In both countries, the systems have become so embedded in public and private services that opting out is nearly impossible.
Starmer closed his comments with praise for “the great benefits of digital ID,” signaling continued support for a model that ties access to key services to digital identity.
The government is also considering extending digital ID cards to children as young as 13, a move that raises fresh concerns about surveillance and the normalization of ID systems from an early age.
Speaking to LBC, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed that the Home Office plans to “consult on details on how we could make it work,” when asked about the possibility of introducing digital identification for teenagers.
Pressed on whether she personally supports issuing digital IDs to 13-year-olds, Cooper avoided giving a clear yes or no. “Well, everybody has forms of digital ID, don’t they now?” she said. “I mean, we all have different ways of having to prove who we are and so on.”
When asked again whether 13-year-olds should have a digital ID, she responded: “Well, lots of 13-year-olds already do. And what the department is going to be consulting on is exactly how that should be taken forward.”
Cooper went on to defend the direction of the policy, framing it as an extension of existing measures. “So I do think that this is the right way forward to have this standardised process now,” she said, referring to the shift toward digital IDs for foreign nationals through E-visas and related systems.
“We’d already started a process of developing, effectively, digital ID with E visas and so on for those coming to the UK from abroad too, so that actually people can prove who they are and whether they have a right to work in the UK.”
Weighing in from across the Atlantic, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has sharply criticized Starmer’s push to link digital ID with access to financial services, warning that such measures pave the way for authoritarian control over everyday life.
In a post shared on X, DeSantis stated that “linking Digital ID with access to financial institutions is one obvious way central authorities will use it to curtail individual freedom,” showing the policy as a direct threat to civil liberties.
DeSantis drew a stark comparison, saying that while some policies are disguised to appear benign, digital ID “is not that; it is a wolf presenting itself as a wolf.”
