Speeches by Jones.

“I will take the question away, Mr Speaker.”

“The Cabinet Office and Government Departments are in the process of concluding their business planning processes before the start of the new fiscal year, so an update will be available very soon.”

“No, and no.”

“As I have outlined previously, work is ongoing across Departments to identify the material relevant to the Humble Address. Throughout this process, the Government have recognised the urgency and seriousness of fully complying with that Humble Address, and that is why we will publish relevant materials in tranches, the …”

“I think there are lots of services that we could make much easier and integrate more in the app, such as the DVLA, tax or getting your MOT information and paperwork presented to you in one place when it is due, as well as your driving licence or paying money to HMRC—or even getting some back, if you are lucky. There ar…”

“Quite frankly, it is mad that you currently have companies verifying the identity of people but, if they think there are problems, they do not currently share that information with us because we do not have anywhere to put it. That is slightly barmy. My hope is that we will build a system where, whether you are verifyi…”

“There is a wider benefit as well. We know that fraud more generally is a huge issue and a huge strain on our police service. I am sure we have all had constituents who have lost money fraudulently online in some way, and they get pointed to Action Fraud, where it just gets reported as a statistic. The police do not oft…”

“I think Parliament would have to legislate for the public to have that. My hope, though, from a user experience, is that if you are logging into the gov.uk app with your digital ID in a number of years’ time, and some of these services are coming into the app, you will, in practice, just use one thing to get into the s…”

“Sure, but there has always been freedom for citizens to decide whether they wish to do it or not, as opposed to us saying, “This is what you must do.””

“I think it is just because historically we have never had a mandatory Government-issued identity in this country in the way that some other European countries may do. We have had the freedom to have a passport if we wish to have one or not, or a driving licence if we have qualified or not.”

“The benefit of consultation is that we can take those views on. Of course a passport does last for 10 years, so it is only once every 10 years that would need to be done.”

“Digital identity, as I say, will not be a login. It will be a legal identity in its own right. I see no reason in the long term why, through the app, you cannot have just one place where your information is, whether you choose to have access to certain services or not and whether you therefore wish to use that legal id…”

“My understanding is it would be the user’s responsibility to update that.”

“I would assume so, but we are not at the stage of being able to answer that because we need to consult on it.”

“It does not exist yet, so it does not belong anywhere. It is an idea at this stage as opposed to a thing. We will be consulting on some of the questions on security standards. I have asked the team to make sure it is at least equivalent to banking level security, with banking apps. Some of that is about device-level se…”

“Yes.”

“For this system.”

“There are two parts to the answer. One is: I do not think that we will end up saying that we want to build one massive central Government database with all the data in. This is in consultation, but I think that we will end up with a federated system where different types of data are still secure in different Department…”

“We have not made any early decisions yet. We have consulted across Government by saying to Departments, “What services would you like to be considered for coming on to the system?” We have already done some early integrations such as the veteran card being on your phone—driving licences will be coming shortly—but the p…”

“The commitment we have made is by 2029. If I can bring it forward, with the consent of Parliament, I would like to do that. I struggle to think that these things take as long as I am told they do, but I might be wrong. The long stop date, which was the Prime Minister’s commitment, was 2029.”