If Britain had brought in identity cards, illegal immigration would be a fraction of today’s level. It’s not too late to revive them and stop the boats

THE trade in human misery, with tens of thousands of undocumented migrants being trafficked in great danger across the Channel every year, is a tragically avoidable crisis.

We had the solution literally in our pockets when people smuggling was just starting to become a serious problem for border control.

And we could still make that solution work.

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.

I can say this with certainty, because when I was Home Secretary in the early Noughties, I introduced an experimental ID scheme that produced dramatic results. If Britain had kept that system and developed it, I believe the small boats scandal might never have happened.

Secure

In 2002, I was negotiating with Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister. He offered to permit UK immigration, security and customs officials on French soil, but only if Britain proved willing to play its part in stemming the tide of migration across Europe.

Unlike most European countries, we do not have a post- war tradition of ID cards. But it seemed to me the scheme was a no-brainer. If migrants needed an ID card to work in Britain or claim benefits or get nonemergency treatment on the NHS, they would be less inclined to come here.

And it was not that revolutionary. Debit cards and credit cards had been commonplace for decades — and both acted as a form of personal identification.

Bank cards had the disadvantage, of course, that they could be stolen — a form of basic identity theft. What I had in mind was far more secure, incorporating biometric technology that could not easily be faked or misused. But I had not fully anticipated the strength of opposition from a vocal minority who accused me of attempting to mastermind some sort of Orwellian deep state surveillance.

The scheme was depicted as insidious as well as unworkable, and despite a prototype experimental roll-out, I didn’t manage to get it established. Only 15,000 were ever issued.

Fewer than 20 per cent of voters opposed the plan. Most people could see the sense. One gag did the rounds, a cartoon of two dogs sniffing each other’s behinds. One said to the other: ‘At least with ID cards we won’t have to do this any more.’ That gave me a chuckle.

But a small, fanatical group was dedicated to killing the proposal. In a widely reported stunt, they burnt a fake card with my face on it.

With hindsight, I should have enlisted teenagers first, offering them free passports at 16 with an ID card alongside. That would have been a popular measure — and by now those teens would be in their mid- 30s. All those renewing passports would have automatically been enrolled into the system.

The angry minority, obsessed with the myth of state surveillance, would have been neatly bypassed.

How ironic that many of the same people who protested at the very notion of ID cards were cheerfully signing up to social media within a few years.

Companies such as Facebook and Elon Musk’s X really do have the capacity for deep surveillance, by analysing our online activity. Mobile phones can even track our physical movements via global positioning satellites. The worst predictions for my ID cards seem utterly innocuous compared with the everyday monitoring of our lives today.

We also use our smartphones as ID devices in more official ways. Many people have debit and credit card information on their phone, and some have health information via the NHS app.

Why not have an ID card on your smartphone? And for those who don’t have one of these phones, there would be a card as a safe alternative for ID purposes — simple to carry and simple to use.

When the coalition government came to power in 2010, Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems insisted that abolishing the embryonic ID scheme had to be a priority, despite its proven success in slashing unauthorised immigration.

Back then, in 2002, migrants were being smuggled into the UK in lorries and through the Channel Tunnel. We saw that insidious trade reduced by two thirds. The gangs realised it wasn’t worth their while to traffic people into the UK if migrants found they were unable to work or claim benefits without an ID card, and thus would be liable to deportation.

Pressure

It made no sense to ditch the ID scheme, albeit that it was still in its infancy. If we had maintained and developed it, illegal immigration would be running at a fraction of today’s levels.

According to figures released yesterday, the number of people who have arrived this year in Britain on small boats passed 5,000 by Easter Sunday. And with calmer seas in summer, that figure will soar.

There are other obvious advantages to ID cards. One significant pressure on the NHS, making waiting lists longer, is the phenomenon of ‘ health tourism’. Foreign nationals who need hospital treatment frequently find it cheaper to fly to Britain and use ours for free, than to have healthcare at home.

Not only does this cost the taxpayer money, it also means that others are inevitably subjected to longer delays.

And there’s a more urgent problem faced by doctors in A&E departments across the country every day. Women with unexplained injuries, consistent with beatings and sexual abuse, are brought to emergency wards by men who claim to be their husbands and insist on speaking for them. Commonly, doctors are told these women do not understand English.

Exploitation

There’s no way of disproving these claims, though the doctors might suspect the women are being held captive in conditions of modern-day slavery. The men might be gang members, but without any requirement to present ID, little can be done to further investigate.

Slavery is an abhorrent blight on our society — and it’s on the rise. ID cards could supply an effective weapon to combat it.

As long as we have no means of establishing a person’s identity, organised criminals will find ways to circumvent all our safeguards. There’s little use in threatening to send immigrants to Rwanda for processing if the traffickers are able to put people to work in the subterranean economy and hide them from official view.

That is a shortcut to exploitation of migrants, fuelling a financial subculture where workers are not paid a living wage and gangsters pay no tax. It prevents us from protecting the victims and punishing the criminals.

It’s not too late to introduce an effective ID card system now. We can’t turn back the clock, but we can take dramatic action against the future activity of people who traffick others.