Following previous fiery exchanges with MPs on parliament’s dedicated DSIT scrutiny entity, members serving on the influential Public Accounts Committee will shortly begin gathering evidence on the proposed tech programme

Parliament’s public spending watchdog has announced a soon-to-launch formal inquiry into government’s plans for a new state-issued national digital identity.

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has this week unveiled a new slate of inquiries that will be undertaken over the coming months. Included among these investigations is a probe examining digital identity.

All of the inquiries will be “informed by the work of the National Audit Office [and] committee members will use reports as a starting point and agreed factual basis from which to conduct their scrutiny to hold government to account for how it spends public money”.

In the case of digital ID, the NAO is expected to release a report this summer, after which “PAC will take evidence from witnesses including senior government officials, user groups and campaigners on topics including the purpose and necessity of digital ID in the UK, successes and challenges in previous approaches, and what lessons can be learned from other countries”.

Related content

• Government pledges ‘local conversations and events to encourage participation’ in digital ID consultation
• Minister: ‘There are no circumstances in which the government will sell the public’s digital ID data to private companies’
• Digital ID consultation: Bad news for ‘annoying people’, good news for future governments – and five other things we learned

The newly created webpage for the inquiry adds: “While the UK uses a range of digital identity services, it does not currently operate a national ID card or single citizen identifier scheme. In September 2025, the prime minister announced a new digital ID scheme, with a target to launch by the end of the current Parliament in 2029. In January 2026, it was further announced that digital ID would not be mandatory, but would become one of a number of ways in which people would be able to prove their right to work.”

The website notes that, in an inquiry undertaken in 2019, the committee “scrutinised GOV.UK Verify, the flagship digital programme for government, [and] its report found that the system was failing its users, having missed all of its original performance targets”.

The committee also acknowledges that the Home Affairs Committee last year “launched its own inquiry into harnessing the potential of new forms of digital ID in June 2025”.

The subject of government’s digital ID plans has also come up numerous times in – sometimes rather fiery – evidence sessions of the Science, Innovation and Technology.

Anyone interested in participating in the upcoming PAC inquiry is advised that “the committee will be seeking written evidence submissions in due course; please look at the requirements for written evidence submissions and note that the committee cannot accept material as evidence that is published elsewhere”.

As well as digital ID,  PAC will also shortly commence inquiries on the topics of: Armed forces housing and Annington Homes; financial sustainability of the British Council; regulation of water, energy and broadband; and HMRC’s anti-fraud intervention on child benefit.