Public Sector
He'll have to beat Nigel Farage in a Brexit-backing constituency first, though
The government’s plans to introduce digital ID could be put in doubt if Andy Burnham, who spoke out against the scheme last September, replaces Keir Starmer as the UK prime minister.The Greater Manchester mayor told a session at the UK's Labour party conference in Manchester last autumn that he opposed digital ID given the problems the previous Labour government he had served in had experienced with ID cards.
“I think there’s a risk of an opportunity cost situation here, where something can consume a huge amount of time and actually doesn’t come through,” he said. “And that will be the lesson about 2005 to 2010 Parliament; it consumed a lot of air time and it didn’t actually materialize.”
ID cards did actually materialize – with 13,200 produced before the scheme was scrapped. In fact, the Home Office used Manchester as a testing ground for the scheme. Burnham helped to sell it when he was a Home Office minister in 2005-6, telling the BBC that compulsory national ID cards would be “a major breakthrough” in tackling identity fraud.
