Chiming in as a Brit: I m generally opposed to this.

I already have a passport and that is digitalised and universal. Why not just use that?

The UK has a bad habit of launching these programs and not being able to deliver on them.

We have had National Insurance numbers for a long time, these are used to track income tax payments and benefits. But that doesn’t work apparently. So I had to set up a Unique Tax Reference number. Just to do my tax return. This involved several letters back and forth. Actual paper sent in the post over several weeks. The government already have all the tax information they just need me to do 20h of work because they can’t keep their files straight.

They made a mess of that. So I now have an additional Unique Tax Reference number. 2 unique IDs…

And they are still getting my taxes wrong. And writing to me about other peoples taxes/benefits payments because they have similar names and live in the same municipality.

Also, I’ve never had any difficulty proving who I am online when I want to. And I should not need to do so anymore than I already chose to.