News round up
Pride and Prejudice
From Flags to Flotillas and Defining our National Identity—Are ID Cards the Solution to Smashing the Smuggling Gangs?
By John Wilson, Executive Editor
Understanding our national identity seems to have become an increasingly polarised and vociferous debate around making Britain “great” again by mimicking the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement from across the pond.
While the US has become deeply divisive in its rhetoric around undocumented migrants on its southern border, the identity of post-Brexit Britons is increasingly viewed through the narrow prism of our divided attitudes to the crisis of small boats making perilous and illegal crossings to the UK.
The debate is also wider than that in terms of the UK’s focus upon general migration. Both legal and illegal, and in the latter category, the often-missed distinction between economic migrants and asylum seekers—those fleeing persecution and worse in their own countries. Both seek better lives in the UK, and importantly for our own law and policy makers, have shunned sanctuary in other “safe” European countries, seeking instead to make their way to Britain.
Whether it’s pride or prejudice or whether we are identified as insular or inclusive, the national conversation is more nuanced than nationalistic.
But the very word “identity” could itself hold the key to managing migration numbers as well as silencing the war of words and solving the crisis that has unfurled like so many of the Union flags fluttering across vast swathes of the UK.
With the rise of Reform, the previous two-party system is attempting to talk tough on all immigration, and the Labour administration has imposed rules that have seen record numbers of employers being banned from sponsoring foreign workers under a crackdown on abuse of the immigration system, as Ministers continue to roll up sleeves and pursue real solutions to secure our borders.
Between July 2024 and June 2025, 1,948 licences allowing companies to bring in migrant workers were revoked—more than double the number in the previous twelve months (937).
Many of the employers had been using work visas to help migrants circumvent immigration rules, as well as undercutting domestic workers by underpaying and exploiting migrant staff reliant on their jobs to stay in the country.
Adult social care, hospitality, retail, and construction are among the sectors with the highest levels of abuse, data shows.
Based on current trends, sponsor revocations for this year are expected to exceed the record high once again. This surge in compliance activity follows just 261 and 247 licences being revoked in the same period in 2021-22 and 2022-23 respectively.
This is part of the Government’s efforts to clamp down on exploitation of our border system and sky-high migration. This includes expanding sanctions on rogue employers, including financial penalty notices, business closure orders, and potential prosecution.
It follows an announcement that the UK will cut access to visas for countries who don’t comply with return of migrants with no right to stay in the UK. It is further evidence that the Government will do what it takes to deliver the reduction in migration the public wants to see, as part of its “Plan for Change”.
The Government has also increased illegal working arrests by 51 per cent compared to the previous year, addressing one of the fake promises sold to migrants making dangerous journeys in small boats that they will be able to work in the UK.
Removals of those with no right to be here have also risen significantly under this Government, with 35,000 people removed—13 per cent more than the same period twelve months prior. Work to “smash the gangs” at source also continues at pace, with National Crime Agency (NCA) enforcement activity at the highest level on record.
Minister for Migration and Citizenship, Mike Tapp MP, said: “Those who abuse our immigration system must face the strongest possible consequences.
We will not hesitate to ban companies from sponsoring workers from overseas where this is being done to undercut British workers and exploit vulnerable staff.
My message to unscrupulous employers is clear: these shameful practices will not be tolerated”.
Improved data and intelligence sharing across Government and law enforcement has resulted in more employers being held to account for breaking the immigration rules.
A new approach, which was previously heavily reliant on physical compliance visits, has helped increase the number of licence revocations exponentially.
Licences have been revoked from companies for a wide range of rule breaking, which includes:
Underpayment of workers.
Facilitating the entry of individuals to circumvent the immigration rules.
Failing to provide promised work.
Illegal Migration
Back to the small boats and the false promises made by smugglers about safe sanctuary and employment in the UK.
By law, employers have to check that prospective candidates have the right to work in the UK.
Since 2022, they have been able to carry out checks on passport-holding British and Irish citizens by using digital verification services that have been certified by the Government.
A Home Office online scheme also exists to verify the status of non-British or Irish citizens, whose immigration status is held electronically.
It is understood officials are looking at whether the universal use of digital ID could provide a more consistent approach to verifying identity.
They are also thought to be exploring whether the scheme could reduce the use of fake documents and make it easier to target enforcement activity.
Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden has already visited Estonia to examine the Baltic state’s extensive use of digital identity to allow citizens to access Government and some private services such as medical records, voting, and banking.
There are sanctions including fines of up to £60,000 per unauthorised worker in cases where foreign workers are found to be working illegally.
For agency workers, the responsibility lies with the agency to conduct the relevant checks.
In March, the Government announced the requirement would be extended to self-employed contractors carrying out work on behalf of a company.
Currently, firms are responsible for conducting checks on such workers only if they have sponsored the visa allowing them to work in the UK.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper argued the extension would help enforcement in the so-called gig economy, where many workers are employed in temporary or casual roles.
In July, French President Emmanuel Macron said the UK had agreed to address the “fight against illegal work” as part of pull factors attracting illegal migrants.
The Government, under pressure to find alternative living arrangements for around 32,000 asylum seekers has promised to stop using hotels by the time of the next election in 2029.
Sir Keir Starmer said he had asked officials at the Home Office and Ministry of Defence to “work at pace” to identify military sites that could be used to provide alternative accommodation.
The debate around illegal immigration has focused upon those illegal entrants seeking asylum from persecution and those economic migrants looking for access to work in Britain.
Here the self-examination about who we really are as a nation also has practical economic implications in terms of access to employment and employees, particularly in the UK’s flourishing “gig” economy, where according to the British Safety Council (BSC) more than 7.25 million people—22 per cent of the total UK workforce—have found mainly secondary jobs in sectors such as retail and hospitality.
These sectors are typically characterised by lower wages offset against more flexible working arrangements and a need to meet the constant replenishment requirements of a consumer-driven market driven by seasonal demand.
This makes the industries attractive to organised criminal gangs who often operate internationally and look to exploit employment vulnerabilities to create insider threats.
According to a report from Cifas, the UK fraud prevention service, insider threats and staff fraud surged by 22 per cent in 2023 compared to the previous year. One in five of those cases was committed within the first three months of employment, again highlighting the importance of thorough vetting.
“The growth of gig work has been paralleled by a sharp rise in employee fraud, when someone knowingly misrepresents their identity or provides false information for their own gain”, the report said.
And, according to a 2025 BSC survey, a failure to properly check the qualifications, skills and competency when recruiting and onboarding temporary workers could also pose a risk, both to health and safety at work and to the organisation’s public reputation. The report says: “The UK gig economy is booming…. and while the appeal to hire gig workers often lies in their ability to quickly fill critical skill gaps, many employers may be increasingly facing safety concerns due to a common oversight in the hiring process: thorough background screening and vetting”.
Investigative Journalism
In September, a BBC File on 4 documentary entitled “Behind the Doors of the Asylum Hotels” gained rare access to four hotels used for housing asylum seekers. It found that many had found jobs in the so-called Black economy, possibly before they arrived in the UK. The jobs, the investigative reporter Sue Mitchell found, were often paying back outstanding debts to people smugglers.
In her report, Ms Mitchell who has previously tracked and identified people traffickers to the UK, said many of the hotel residents are now working illegally.
In one interview she said Kadir (not his real name) wants to work but won’t do so illegally:
“However, he says he knows plenty of hotel residents who seek to supplement the £9.95 a week they receive from the Government.
Kadir introduces me to Mohammed, who arrived from Afghanistan a few weeks ago. Mohammed fixed up a job before he even hit UK soil, he says, as his cousin was already here and working illegally. He is now earning £20 a day for shifts that he says can last ten hours, sometimes longer.
When I challenge Mohammed on why he is breaking the law, he says he has no choice because his family owes money to people-smugglers. It is a story I hear from other asylum seekers too. Mohammed wants to send money back to his wife in the hope that one day—if he is allowed to remain in the UK—she will be able to join him”.
You and Yours
Also in September, a BBC Radio 4 “You and Yours” investigation uncovered a scam among the food delivery app companies that found that many illegal workers are “sub-contracted” as a means of circumnavigating the right to work requirements mandated by the UK Government.
This anomaly of the immigration rules was enshrined in law, allowing the delivery company to structure its mode around self-employed independent contractors who use a “supplier agreement” that allows them to provide a substitute to complete deliveries, which is a core aspect of their independent business.
This flexibility is central to their model, as confirmed by the Supreme Court in a 2023 ruling that upheld the riders’ independent contractor status, rejecting claims for worker rights and union recognition. The legal right to substitute, therefore, legitimises the process of a rider, acting as a self-employed contractor, assigning their work to another self-employed individual.
This scam was uncovered by citizen activists using a WhatsApp group chat to investigate the mysterious delivery of uniforms and radio holders to unrelated addresses that had not asked for the “rider starter kits”.
It was discovered that this was the result of sub-letting or account takeover scams potentially involving illegal workers, and the delivery aggregator company had launched its own urgent investigation and frozen any further deliveries to the area of London in question.
All of these issues once again raise the spectre of the need for digital identity cards which had been mooted in the UK by Tony Blair’s administration in the early noughties before being shelved by the Coalition Government in 2011 as too costly in a time of financial austerity.
Lord Blunkett
The absence of any stringent vetting driven by cost and time considerations in many sectors brings us back to the issue of identity, and moreover the absence of the kind of identity cards that have been common currency in Europe for years.
Despite protestations from libertarian groups such as “Big Brother Watch”, the argument for ID cards has once again become louder as a year into the Labour administration calls for more radical measures to tackle illegal migration are finding a voice in the burgeoning ranks of Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
In the Winter 2024 edition of Loss Prevention Magazine Europe, in an article entitled “Deregulation Nation”, Lord David Blunkett, the former Labour Home Secretary during Tony Blair’s premiership who first introduced the idea of identity (ID) cards more than twenty years ago said a digital scheme today would act as a key deterrent to people seeking to move to the UK illegally.
Investigations into the root causes of growing illegal migration have laid bare some harsh domestic truths that post-Brexit Britain now lies beyond the reaches of Europe’s own well-established ID card schemes and the Dublin Accord, the regulation determining which EU state would process your asylum application.
Apart from Ireland, Britain is the only country in Europe without an ID card system, a key factor that drives the small boats, according to Lord Blunkett.
In an essay shared with LPME, he says, “Identity cards, are a simple, practical, and affordable answer, one that would shatter the business model of organised international gangs making billions from human trafficking”.
He based that on his experience as Home Secretary in the early noughties when he introduced an experimental ID scheme that “produced dramatic results”.
“If Britain had kept that system and developed it, the small boats scandal might never have happened. If migrants needed an ID card to work in Britain or claim benefits or get non-emergency treatment on the NHS, they would be less inclined to come here”.
It is, he says, a “no brainer”.
Back in 2010, legislation to introduce the scheme was the subject of bitter clashes in the House of Lords and plans to make them compulsory for UK citizens was later dropped.
Around fifteen thousand entered circulation but the scheme was scrapped, and the database destroyed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government in 2011.
ID Cards Today
Critics who claim that the cost and logistical challenges would derail the introduction of such a scheme today have been met with counterarguments from the Tony Blair Institute who argue that Ukraine introduced its ID scheme during its war with Russia, and India also introduced an ID card to more than 1.5 billion people without any major issues.
In September Sir Keir announced that the Government will make it illegal to work in the UK without a new digital ID card by the end of this Parliament.
The Prime Minister’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney who commissioned the report from the Tony Blair Institute believes that ID cards could reduce friction between the public and state, similar to that built off the back of the success of the NHS app.
McSweeney is said to have been “forceful” in pressing the case for compulsory digital ID cards as it would allow Sir Keir to echo the pledge of Harold Wilson to “seize the initiative” around the “white heat of technology” by making ID cards a top ministerial priority.
Ministers say that attitudes have significantly shifted from twenty years ago. A recent poll found that 53 per cent of the population would back such a scheme.
Consequently, the Prime Minister has been in listening mode and said a new identity programme could play an “important part” in reducing the incentive to enter the UK without permission.
Sir Keir said: “We all carry a lot more digital ID now than we did twenty years ago, and I think that psychologically, it plays a different part—my instinct is that it can play an important part.”
He added that two decades on from the row over New Labour’s physical ID card scheme, the public was likely to look differently at a digital-based scheme.
He did not confirm whether any new digital ID scheme would be mandatory, but its efficacy as a deterrent would be contingent on a form of obligatory compulsion.
Despite some vociferous opposition from libertarian lobby groups such as “Big Brother Watch”, the introduction of digital ID cards seems to be a question of when and how rather than if. This may be a result of rancorous rhetoric and flag waving or simply a recognition of a technology whose time has arrived along with a flotilla of other regulations that seriously curb illegal migration by disrupting the market in steady labour and disincentivising those wanting to make dangerous crossings.
In short, it may not be the high seas that pose a threat to the people smugglers, but the higher risk and higher stakes for the high streets that have unwittingly propped up the illegal movement of people that finally grounds the movement of small boats.
