“As national borders [get] transformed by new technologies and new thinking about how to manage flows of goods and people as quickly and safely as possible, the UK border needs continuing innovation and reform” – and part of that innovation should be the UK extending its proposed Digital Identity scheme for EU residents to all UK citizens.
The reason: “this is the era not of the elimination of borders, as it is sometimes claimed, but of the smarter border”.
The suggestion comes from the Policy Exchange think tank this week in the shape of a new report on the status and future of the UK’s immigration structures, The Border Audit.
The departure point for its arguments for what is essentially a re-run of the then-controversial New Labour National ID Card scheme is that times have changed – and national policy should, too.
“A unique digital reference for interactions with the state is being developed for the 3.6m EU citizens settled here after Brexit. This experiment with a unique number system should be a trial run for an initially voluntary system for UK citizens,” says the group in a blog its authors, David Goodhart and Dr Richard Norrie, published yesterday summarising their main themes.
These include implementing a UK-version of the ESTA visa-waiver scheme run by the US – “After Brexit, all non-UK arrivals who do not need a visa should be required to fill in a “visa lite” Electronic Travel Authorisation (like the US ESTA system) to allow for increased use of e-Gates (a UK border success story) and swifter movement across the border for low-risk groups” – and a scheme so those who have been here illegally for more than 10 years should be able to regularise their status.
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But most attention is being focused on the idea that “in the long run” mistakes like Windrush can best be avoided by building on national Digital Identity management systems like the BRP (Biometric Residence Permit) scheme: “With more people living in the country temporarily, with more conditions on their residence, some form of unique number identification for establishing status (with the state, employers, landlords and so on) is vital for all those without permanent residence status. The identity management experiment for EU citizens remaining in the UK after Brexit should be a prototype for a national system.”
HMG should also “abandon the aim of breaking even in the border function” and instead aim to increase spending, currently just 0.3% of public spending on the border, gradually, investing part of this uplift in more detection systems for lorries at Calais and Dover, more detention places for migration offenders, more legally trained asylum officers, more border patrol vessels for the coastline and more facial recognition technology at the border.
Policy Exchange describes itself as educational charity with a mission “to develop and promote new policy ideas which deliver better public services, a stronger society and a more dynamic economy”, and is seen as one of the largest and most influential of such centres on the UK political Right.
