Every adult in Britain will require a digital ID under plans to tackle illegal immigration.

Sky News understands that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer could announce his backing for the scheme in a speech as early as Friday.

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The so-called “Brit card” would verify a citizen’s right to live and work in the UK.

The plans would require anyone starting a new job or renting a home to show the card on a smartphone app, which would then be checked against a central database of those entitled to work and live here.

It is hoped this would reduce the attraction of working in the UK illegally, including for delivery companies.

At the moment, workers have to show at least one form of physical ID in the form of documents, but there are concerns within government that these can be faked.

French President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly warned that the lack of ID cards in the UK acts as a major pull factor for Channel crossings, as migrants feel they are able to find work in the black economy.

Sir Keir is due to speak at the Global Progress Action Summit in London on Friday, alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

The plan represents a shift in the government’s position, as last year ministers ruled out the idea following an intervention from Sir Tony Blair just days after Labour won the general election.

The former Labour prime minister has long been an advocate of ID cards and took steps to introduce a system that would begin as voluntary and could later become compulsory while in office.

The rollout was scrapped after Labour was ejected from power in 2010, having been opposed by the Liberal Democrats and the Tories at the time.

Last July, then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said of the idea: “It’s not in our manifesto. That’s not our approach.”

The UK has only previously had mandatory ID cards during wartime, with the last tranche scrapped in 1952.

The idea has long been opposed by civil liberty and privacy groups in the UK.

Sir Keir is said to have shared their concerns but came round to the idea amid record high levels of small boat crossings.

A report by the Tony Blair Institute published on Wednesday said digital ID can “help close loopholes that trafficking gangs and unscrupulous employers currently exploit, reducing pull factors driving illegal migration to Britain and restoring control over borders”.

Labour Together, a Starmer-backed thinktank, published a report in June which said digital ID could play a role in right-to-work and right-to-rent checks, supporting “better enforcement of migration rules”.

How would digital ID work?

There is no unique regime for identity cards, but decisions the government would have to make include who is required to register, how much information they should hold, and whether physical forms of the ID should also be made available.

Pat McFadden, now the work and pensions secretary, started a cross-government unit to look at how it could work while he was in charge of the cabinet office.

He visited Estonia last month, before the cabinet reshuffle, where he said the Baltic country’s model could be used as an example.

In Estonia, citizens are given a unique number at birth which they use to register marriages, access bank accounts, vote, book GP appointments, file their tax return and even collect supermarket loyalty points, among hundreds of other services.

Mr McFadden told The Times digital ID could be applied “to the immigration system, to the benefit system, to a number of areas”.

‘Checkpoint society’

The government’s plan will be subject to a consultation and would require legislation to be passed, before being rolled out.

Labour MPs on the left of the party have already hit out at the idea.

Nadia Whittome labelled the policy “divisive, authoritarian nonsense”, adding: “If we’re going to reheat Blair-era policies, can we please focus on lifting children out of poverty?”

Reform UK and the Tories are also against the proposal, arguing it will not stop small boat crossings.

The Lib Dems meanwhile said they were against the principle of people being “forced to turn over their private data just to go about their daily lives”.

The civil liberty group Big Brother Watch said: “Plans for a mandatory digital ID would make us all reliant on a digital pass to go about our daily lives, turning us into a checkpoint society that is wholly unBritish.”

Fans of digital ID cards argue that they will speed the UK into a digital future by giving everyone a way to prove who they are.

What’s confusing about this argument is that we can do that already.

We have physical ID cards in the form of passports and driving licences. We also have an extensive system of digital identification and a whole range of laws that require you to prove your identity, sometimes multiple times a week.

If you’ve employed someone recently, even for a few days, you’ll know that you have to check their right to work documents, either physically or digitally.

It’s the same if you open a bank account, hire a solicitor, file a tax return, vote in an election or apply to get government services like Universal Credit. These days, even accessing pornographic content online requires an identity check.

The trouble, from a government point of view, is that none of these systems are joined together, which makes it possible to slip through the gaps.

Despite all the checks, for instance, illegal immigrants regularly get access to bank accounts. The Home Office is meant to share its data with banks and building societies to stop this happening, but the information is often incomplete or just plain wrong: that’s why the system had to be paused for four years after the Windrush scandal came to light.

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A truly efficient system would clean this kind of data, link it up, and connect it in one sweeping overview. But that would require the creaking civil service to access information that’s often hard to find, let alone share.

Much easier – or so advocates of ID cards say – to sweep the old bureaucracy aside and begin again with a single central system.

The result, they say, would be a system that’s faster and more reliable for citizens. But mainly this is a piece of infrastructure that, its proponents hope, would make government function in the way it’s supposed to.

All of which raises the question – do we actually want that?

Do we want a government that can track us in every part of our lives? That can actually enforce the law, in a way it has no hope of doing currently?

The government believes the answer is yes. Their focus groups and polling tell them that people are sick and tired of failing government systems and desperate for decisive action, especially on immigration.

That’s why the bigger risk in all this might not be the politics but the delivery.

Can they make sure this system is built on budget and without massive delays? Can they get it operating at scale without suffering a hack or a major technical glitch?

Can they show people that the problem is the current system, not the way it is being used?

This is a task that even Google or Amazon would quail at. One that makes HS2 look easy.

Yet Whitehall – not known for its tech expertise – might be asked to take it on, perhaps in time for the next election.

A taxi driver who dropped triple killer Axel Rudakubana at a Southport dance studio and then drove away as he launched his attack has apologised to the families of the victims for not doing more.

Alice Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, were killed at the Taylor Swift-themed class on 29 July last year by Rudakubana, who was later jailed for a minimum of 52 years.

The inquiry was told that Rudakubana was picked up from his home in nearby Banks by Gary Poland from One Call Taxis. He got into the back, wearing a green hoodie with the hood up and a COVID-type face mask.

The pair did not speak during the journey, but when Rudakubana got out of the taxi in Hart Street, and was asked “cash or card?”, he walked off without paying.

Mr Poland got out of his vehicle and pursued Rudakabuna as he walked down an alleyway to a vehicle body shop, but the killer told him and workers at a nearby garage: “What are you going to do about it?”

Mr Poland got back into his car and drove down the alleyway that led to the Hart Space, telling him: “You pay now, or the police are on their way, you f**king knob.”

He saw Rudakubana as he tried the door to the ground floor, and then found the door to the upper floors was unlocked and went inside.

The taxi driver turned his vehicle around, but as he prepared leave, children could be seen in the rear dashcam running alongside the taxi, and it was possible to hear their screams, the inquiry was told.

Mr Poland looked in the rearview mirror, then drove off. He took another fare before returning home and eventually calling the police at 12.36pm, 50 minutes after the attack.

It was only then that they were able to identify Rudakubana, who had refused to tell them who he was when he was arrested by two unarmed police officers.

Mr Poland told the inquiry, in a statement: “On reflection, I do consider that I should have called the police earlier. In hindsight, I wish I had done, and it is something that I think about every day – what I should have done, and how this is my fault because I drove him there.

“I regret not helping the children, their screams were harrowing, and I can still hear them when I think back to that day.

“I regret not doing more. There isn’t a day that passes when I don’t think about that day and what ifs. What if I had called the police? What if I had got out of my car? What if I had apprehended him for not paying me? But I do not know the answers.”

He said he thought there was a “gunman shooting at people” and believed it was the person he had just been shouting at to pay and threatening to call the police, and was worried about becoming a target.

Mr Poland admitted hearing the screams and seeing children running out of the building and said he “just panicked and was not thinking clearly.”

“I did what I did based upon fear, shock and panic, these are human emotions which I could not control. I can only say that I panicked, and I fled for my own safety,” Mr Poland added.

“I cannot imagine what the victims and the families of the victims have been through, and they have my deepest sympathy for what happened that day.”

As he drove off, Mr Poland said children were running “like a stampede for their lives” and added: “I was in a state of complete mortal terror and shock.”

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Tattooed and wearing a black zip-up top, white t-shirt and glasses, he told the inquiry: “I just remember seeing the face. I can’t sleep at night, I shut my eyes, I see his face, it’s just there all the time in my head.”

However, in a phone call to his friend, who ran the vehicle body shop next door to the Hart Space, recorded on the dashcam after he pulled up around the corner, Mr Poland said: “I’ve just dropped a lad off, I chased him down your thing. He ran next door and I think he shot some people.

“Do you not hear screaming and shots go off? He’s just f**king shot everyone ain’t he?”

His friend, Julian Medlock, told him: “Lucky you weren’t in it” and Mr Poland added: “He shot upstairs and I heard these f**king shots and I f**king shot off Jim. Lucky he didn’t shoot me, weren’t it?”

Nicholas Moss KC, counsel to the inquiry, said: “The outside observer listening to this exchange may pick up a sense of disbelief from you about what had happened, but not ‘mortal terror and shock’

“That wasn’t your state at the time that you made this call, was it?”

Mr Poland replied: “All I can say is I was in shock and I didn’t know what was what.”

Mr Moss added: “At any time during this call, did you say anything about those young girls or their welfare?”

Mr Poland said: “I don’t think so. I really don’t know.”

Mr Moss said: “The fact that you were prepared to confront him verbally might be thought to suggest you are not a shrinking violet, would that be fair?”

“Correct,” Mr Poland replied.

He told the inquiry: “If I thought he had a knife, I probably would have got out and disarmed him. It’s only a knife.”

When Rudakubana went into the building, he thought that he had gone to get him his money and he would wait.

“I was thinking, he’s not said much, I’m thinking, he’s gone to get some money, and then that’s when, a minute or two later, I heard all these screams, and I thought, what’s going on there.’

“What I thought I heard was gunshots, four or five gunshots. That’s when I got worried, and I thought, I’m not going to confront anybody with a gun. I don’t think anybody would.”

The inquiry continues.