In Your Hand

“We have to build a New State and shut down the Legacy State, with digital ID making people’s experience of that New State fundamentally much better,” said Darren Jones in October. While I revile both the horseshoe theory and most comparisons with the Great Dictators, on that occasion Jones managed to sound like both Benito Mussolini and Mao Zedong. And now, he tells Steven Swinford:

For Darren Jones, chief secretary to the prime minister, the case for digital ID is simple: it is about making your life easier.

“At the moment, if you ask the public [about the state] they would probably describe it as call centres, being on hold, lots of paperwork, having to repeat your story a million times to different parts of government, frustration with not knowing whether you’re going to get the help you need,” he says. “It needs to feel more like your banking or shopping app. It’s in your hand. It’s easy to do.”

Jones is making the pitch for digital ID after Sir Keir Starmer this week abandoned plans to make it compulsory for right-to-work checks as part of a crackdown on migration, the 13th U-turn of his premiership.

The new pitch is based on the fact that the system will be voluntary, and that it will ultimately offer access to nearly all public services — barring the NHS, which will continue to be separate — in a single app.

It will, Jones says, be a one-stop shop. “Digital ID is always a foundational technology for building the new state,” he says. “Because what does it actually mean? It means that you can log in to the app and prove who you are. So if you think about administrative services in government, passports, driving licences, eligibility for welfare payments, payments to the tax man, money you might receive, how you access your childcare provision.

“The government provides lots of these services, but they’re all completely disintegrated at the moment across different parts of government and different call centres and different apps and all that type of stuff. You bring all of that together.”

The government’s consultation, which will be published in the next month, will include an option allowing parents to apply for digital IDs for newborn children to make it easier to access services.

“You’ve got to bring the public with you on these things, so it will depend what the appetite is for it,” Jones says. “The arguments for it are that, if you’re trying to be able to verify what eligibility you have for support for your kids, you need to be able to verify who your kids are and that they have certain eligibility criteria.

“You might have children with disabilities or additional needs and that type of stuff. Now, you can verify that in other ways too, so you don’t have to give digital ID to children to enable that. It just means there’s a bit more friction in the process. And so it will be a question in the consultation.”

Jones does not buy Reform UK’s claim that the state is broken, but says it “definitely needs modernisation”. For him, it is personal. He grew up in a council estate in Bristol — his father was a security guard, his mother a hospital administrator — and went to a school that was at the time one of the worst performing in the country.

When he was growing up, he says, he resolved “not to be as poor as I was” and to find the same security as he enjoyed with his family. “It shouldn’t be exceptional,” he says. “It’s not that everyone will want to be chief secretary to the prime minister, but I want people who have hopes and aspirations in their life to be able to fulfil them.”

He rejects an idea recently floated by a former aide to Starmer that Britain is being held back by the “stakeholder state” — effectively, the blob. “I feel perfectly empowered as a minister to get on and fix things,” he says. “I don’t feel held back by anyone, quite frankly.”

Along with digital ID, he wants to transform the incentives in the civil service. At present just over half of civil servants get bonuses, which Jones says are automatic for many people. “The performance management system is not working well enough,” he says. “You basically check each other’s homework and then broadly say everyone’s doing a good job, and then the bonuses are paid automatically. That can’t be right.”

He says that there needs to be “independent, quantifiable” assessments of performance to show that people are genuinely performing and delivering for voters. He wants far fewer civil servants to get bonuses so that only the best are rewarded, and says that those rewards should be higher. “If you’re delivering important outcomes for the public … then I’m totally fine with incentivising that,” he says.

He says he would be comfortable with outstanding individuals getting bonuses of more than £10,000, provided that the overall bonus pot remains the same. “You should get a bonus because you’ve done something exceptional.”

He also wants civil servants who fail to perform to be sacked. “When people are failing you can’t just constantly have this sideways shimmy of people being moved to another job,” he says. “You need to be shown the door.”

Jones also argues that there are too many policy experts in Whitehall, and that all senior officials must have experience of delivering on the front line. “We need people who know how to get stuff done and understand the customer,” he says. Does he want fewer wonks? “I’m a wonk too, so I don’t criticise wonks. But you need to understand people’s lives.”

A key part of Jones’s role has been stripping down the prime minister’s smorgasbord of priorities from his first year in office to just one: the cost of living.

“We’ve got a path to get the country onto a stronger footing,” he says. “There’s a reason the bond markets are being broadly stable. There’s a reason interest rates are coming down. There is a reason the Bank of England base rate and inflation is coming back to target. That is a consequence of stability, predictability and a strong government.”

His message to those plotting to oust Starmer is that they do so at their own peril. “He is making the case that what the public want from their politicians right now is a government that’s getting on with delivering,” Jones says. “If we don’t do that, the public will see us as part of the problem and be more enamoured by the populists’ argument of tearing the whole thing down.”

Traditional conservatives and the populist Right would be endlessly ordered to show their digital ID as surely as would be the working class and the youth from which they were in any case largely drawn, as surely as would be trade unionists and anti-cuts campaigners, as surely as would be environmentalists and peace activists, as surely would be the gender-nonconforming and the gender-critical, and as  surely as would be ethnic minorities and the religious minorities that all religions now were. Everyone for whom the abolition of almost all trial by jury would be bad, everyone for whom banning Twitter would be bad, everyone for whom the restriction of social media to over-16s would be bad, everyone to whom the draconian restrictions on peaceful protest were already bad, and so on. United We Stand, Divided We Fall. An injury to one is an injury to all.

The next General Election will be in 2029. When Jones first showed us who he was, then the polls were pointing to a replication of Durham County Council, with a Reform UK majority and with the Liberal Democrats as the Official Opposition. Since then, though, there has been a significant increase in support for the Green Party, and we await the next move from Rupert Lowe, with or without Ben Habib. All of those parties should declare that they would not only vote against digital ID in this Parliament, but also repeal that legislation in the next. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are making steady progress, but Kemi Badenoch’s desire to ban under-16s from social media does not inspire confidence in her on this issue, and nor does her appointment of a Shadow Justice Secretary who came up through the Home Office at all, never mind under Theresa May.