Speeches by Jones.

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

“In my view, Verify became too complicated. The lesson for me is to try to keep it simple. As I say, we will consult on the technical build, but my early personal view is that we have systems in place in Government, whether in the Passport Office, the One Login system or the gov.uk Wallet, where we have already started …”

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

“The Cabinet Office is involved on policy, legislation and co-ordination across Government. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which houses the Government Digital Service, will be responsible for technical build and deployment. As I said in my opening answer, however, we are building a foundational t…”

“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.”

“The consultation is due to launch very soon, so we are not coming to the Committee today saying that we have figured out all the issues. We will be consulting on that over the coming months. The key issue for Northern Ireland and the common travel area is the right to be British, Irish or both in terms of your identity…”

“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.”

“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…”

“As the Committee will know, right to work checks are already a legal requirement. When you get a new job, you have to prove that you have the legal right to work in the UK. Lots of people do that with paperwork. They might take their hard-copy passport, maybe some utility bills or other forms of identity, to their new …”

“Of course. What is digital ID, and why are we pursuing it as a policy? It is essentially the ability to log in to the gov.uk app and prove who you are, in order to access public services. That is different from a standard login, where you can log in to an app with a username and password, because the system is able to …”

“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…”

“In the spending review, the Government funded an increased level of investment into legacy IT transformation. There are too many legacy IT systems across Government. They will not all be transformed into modern systems by the end of this Parliament because it takes time to build the new ones while continuing to maintai…”

“The way I think about it—again, this will be in the consultation—is that you want the digital ID system to be a digital version of the passport system, as opposed to the e-visa system. The passport system has to reach a certain level of verification in order to give the level of confidence that it is legally proof of y…”

“Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. ”

“An important part of that is that we are told that one of the pull factors for illegal working in the UK labour market is that at the moment it is quite easy to get around the system. This will not just be useful for employers, employees and the Home Office enforcement team; we hope it also says to people, “It’s actual…”

“The question or the answer?”

“We will consult on it, but I think the answer will inevitably be yes. The benefit, of course, of the digital system and especially our newer passports, which have a very high level of identity verification and security, is that they mean that the employer does not have to figure out whether a passport is valid. The sys…”

“Part of the consultation will look at what the audit function needs to look like to be effective. Employers have the legal burden to check, so they need to be able to prove their compliance with it too. My personal view is that you will have some audit function, but it will not say, “Darren Jones is working at this uni…”