There is a reason Tony Blair just won’t let ID cards go.
It’s because he sees the future.
He sees the future in former Soviet states like Estonia, who are the darlings of public sector digital people.
They’re way ahead of the UK when it comes to digital update of services, consistently top the UN’s e-government rankings, and they often credit their success to having digital ID cards for all citizens.
Having a single record in a database that’s a proxy for your whole life makes things much simpler for government to administer, whether they’re sending you benefits, baby boxes or a tax bill.
In the UK, ID cards are poison.
Changes to voter ID law haven’t helped. Even if we eventually get them, they won’t resemble Blair’s original 2000s plan.
Identity is political
ID cards are a simple solution to a complicated problem: lots of government services need to know who you are before you can use them.
If you’re privileged and middle-class, doing this is at worst, annoying.
If you’re, a young person estranged from your family, a recent arrival in the country, or sofa-surfing, it can be flat-out impossible.
The way identity documentation works in the UK makes this worse:
Identification is expensive. A passport is ~£80 and a provisional driving licence is £30-40.
Identification is nearly impossible to get if you don’t have a fixed address.
People tend to need government services when they’re most in need, and the people in greatest need are those least likely to have identification.
“We need to create a culture where you don’t have to pay to be identified.
Not only for the ID itself, but the way we validate that ID. It costs £80 for a passport, without paying for a photo, and my GP charges £20 to countersign.”
—one of our research participants
Making ID a requirement for government support often makes things worse by pushing people further into crisis.
Vouching is a middle class occupation
For most of human history we made do without a single identity held by the government. Your friends and acquaintances knew you, and that’s all that mattered. They vouched for you.
But when the census-taking, tax-levying (and eventually, service-providing) bureaucratic state came along, it wanted to know who everyone was, often bending names and identities to fit narrow rules about what people could be called.
In a few rare cases, the UK government still relies on vouching.
Most people will think of getting a passport application countersigned by someone in a recognised profession.
Look down the list and you’ll notice this is a byword for “middle class”:
We want to smash this requirement and replace it with something more equitable, which we’re calling VouchSafe.
Forsooth.
The true power of the vouch
Government thinks of identity in terms of four confidence levels:
low
medium
high
very high
Services that involve money, like benefits, tend to need very high confidence, but there’s plenty of less contentious services (“ask for a new green bin”, say) that make do with low or no confidence. Who you are is irrelevant to them.
We want to replace the simple view of vouching above with something more like this:
Each service has a meter showing how confident they are about your identity.
The meter can be filled up all at once:
by you handing over your passport or driving license, if you have them
by a single, very strong vouch from a pillar of the community
or in chunks, by a number of individually weak, but collectively strong vouches.
Every service will have different rules for what they consider an acceptable confidence score, but the score is the score, no matter whether it came from one strong source or many weaker ones.
We’ve thought about what might contribute to the strength of an individual vouch:
In this way, we can remove the need for the vouchee to be part of a “recognised professions” in some situations, and widen access to support.
Return to tradition
VouchSafe can only work if each service can set their confidence level based on their own risk appetite.
We picture it like the Internet Explorer security levels slider:
Doing more good than harm
The idea here is to give more people more access to government support, especially benefits.
But VouchSafe is still a drastic change to how bureaucracy treats identity, and that comes with the potential to create new harms that are difficult to predict.
Making a person’s access to government support depend on their relationship with someone is not necessarily better than it depending on a document in their pocket. We could magnify the power human traffickers or financial abusers have over their victims.
Even perfectly innocent behaviours like partners, friends and whole families mutually vouching for each other could start to be treated like collusion to defraud government:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62a404d6-356a-4c70-b9b2-16b8986e3ccc_3618x1923.png)
None of these are easy issues to solve, and we don’t have answers to them right now.
Doing the right work isn’t enough. We also need to do the work right, with things like:
involving charities and groups that support victims of abuse, people without fixed addresses, immigrants and all the other groups we’re aiming to help
convening an interdisciplinary panel of experts to anticipate systemic consequences and guard against them
making a team with lived experience of the issues who can spot problems early
starting small and introducing things gradually as we learn
The tech is the easiest part
Just as with our other innovation concepts, the technology to do this already exists.
Keeping track of connections between people is an art that the social media giants have perfected over the last twenty years.
The bit we’re missing is the will and know-how to use it for good rather than evil.
We don’t want to store a big database with an entire country’s worth of details about who knows who. We want to:
store as little as possible
anonymise what we do store, to make it impossible to use beyond the intended use
decentralise and compartmentalise what we do store, and keep the data as close to the user who provided it as possible.
Like splitting up parts of a mystical ancient weapon, decentralisation makes sure that no single organisation can mess things up, deliberately or accidentally.
That’s the difference between VouchSafe and centralised Blair-style ID cards.
VouchSafe is a response to CivTech Challenge 9.7:
How can technology help increase access to public services and products by making use of the trusted relationships people already have?
This is part 3 of a series on innovation concepts: fresh ideas to address long-running problems.
See the rest of the series here.
If you want to talk about this work, hit us up: hello@interrobang.coop.