She said the move by Labour represented “another U-turn”. <\/p>\n
The change of policy is the latest in a series of U-turns the government has made since it came to power \u2013 including climbdowns on welfare reforms, reducing winter fuel payments and inheritance tax for farmers.<\/p>\n
When the government first announced the policy plan, it argued that mandatory digital ID for workers would make it easier to clamp down on immigrants working illegally.<\/p>\n
The scheme, it is understood, will now deal less narrowly with immigration and the government will instead place more emphasis on the argument that digital ID can be a useful tool for the public when accessing public services.<\/p>\n
Asked about the issue at an Institute for Government conference earlier on Tuesday, Darren Jones, the minister responsible for rolling out the policy, said it would be a “route to the digital transformation of customer-facing public services”. <\/p>\n
He said a consultation would be launched “very shortly”, adding: “I’m confident this time next year the polling will be in a much better place on digital ID than it is today.”<\/p>\n
The policy had attracted criticism since it was announced last September, with nearly three million people signing a parliamentary petition opposing the introduction of digital IDs. <\/p>\n
There has also been nervousness among some Labour MPs over the compulsory aspect of the original proposal. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She said the move by Labour represented “another U-turn”. The change of policy is the latest in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-368467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}