Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer

Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer

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Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer He'll have to beat Nigel Farage in a Brexit-backing constituency first, though

SA Mathieson SA Mathieson

Published fri 22 May 2026 // 10:15 UTC

The government’s plans to introduce digital ID could be put in doubt if Andy Burnham, who spoke out against the scheme last September, replaces Keir Starmer as the UK prime minister.The Greater Manchester mayor told a session at the UK's Labour party conference in Manchester last autumn that he opposed digital ID given the problems the previous Labour government he had served in had experienced with ID cards.

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“I think there’s a risk of an opportunity cost situation here, where something can consume a huge amount of time and actually doesn’t come through,” he said.  “And that will be the lesson about 2005 to 2010 Parliament; it consumed a lot of air time and it didn’t actually materialize.”

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ID cards did actually materialize – with 13,200 produced before the scheme was scrapped. In fact, the Home Office used Manchester as a testing ground for the scheme. Burnham helped to sell it when he was a Home Office minister in 2005-6, telling the BBC that compulsory national ID cards would be “a major breakthrough” in tackling identity fraud. 

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On 19 May 2026 Burnham was selected by Labour to fight the Parliamentary seat of Makerfield in a by-election in June. It would be a surprise if the party had not chosen him, given the former MP Josh Simons stood down to provide Burnham with the chance of returning to Parliament and then challenging Starmer as Labour leader and UK prime minister.Until February, Simons was the minister responsible for Starmer’s digital ID plans. He resigned after his decision to commission a probe into journalists who had written critical articles about the think tank he ran, Labour Together. 

Andy Burnham outside during a rally in Manchester Pic credit: R Heilig/Shutterstock

To return to Westminster, Burnham will have to win a by-election in a constituency where Nigel Farage’s Reform party won more than half of the votes in local council elections earlier this month. The area also voted 65 percent in favor of leaving the European Union (EU) in 2016’s Brexit referendum. Burnham is already playing down his previous support for the UK to get closer to the EU as he starts campaigning. MORE CONTEXT London's police asked Big Tech for comms data over 700,000 times last year

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If he wins both Makerfield and then convinces Labour MPs to make him their leader, would he follow through on his comments of last September? Burnham has been known to change his views but if he got to be prime minister, dumping a policy introduced by his predecessor would suggest he was making a fresh start. Digital ID is also opposed by other parties, including Reform, so dropping it would remove a point of difference and could tempt some voters back to Labour. On the other hand many Labour MPs like the policy, and it is their collective call as to whether Burnham becomes prime minister if he can win Makerfield.In the House of Commons on 15 January, then minister Josh Simons made a statement on digital ID in answer to an urgent question from Conservative MP Mike Wood. Responding, Wood told the Commons: “In September, the prime minister tossed this mandatory digital ID on to the table as a classic dead cat distraction, purely to keep Andy Burnham off the front pages as the Labour party conference started.”Wood’s statement was feisty enough for the deputy speaker to mutter “Someone’s had their Weetabix.” But there would be some symmetry if Prime Minister Burnham scrapped a scheme that was supposedly introduced to distract attention from him when he was just the mayor of Greater Manchester. ®

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