When we wrote in Computer Weekly a month ago that the government should stop debating digital ID and start trialling it, we made a narrow argument about a single policy. The Home Affairs Committee has now made a much broader one and the Isle of Wight is the answer to both.
The way to build good digital policy is no mystery. You model it first. You pilot it where it will make people’s lives measurably easier. You learn what works, and what doesn’t, and then you scale and continue to learn and improve.
The frustration with the government’s approach to digital ID has not been the destination but the absence of that path. It announced a major change to how citizens can prove who they are with no prior framing, no modelling, no pilots, and no clear account of how it would help the people it would affect.
That is what the committee’s report, at its core, is asking the government to fix.
The committee’s analysis
The committee’s verdict is candid. The Prime Minister’s announcement last September was, in its words, “rushed, poorly thought through” and “failed to make a convincing case.” Public engagement followed the announcement rather than preceding it. The track record of digital transformation in government, the committee notes, is “poor.” The objectives have shifted, the costs are unclear, and the roadmap is still being built.
But the report is not a counsel of despair. Read carefully, it is a constructive manual for how to do policy properly – clear objectives, public trust, evidence before scaling, parliamentary safeguards against function creep and what the committee memorably calls “not a slippery slope, rather a staircase, with progress and direction governed by Parliament.”
The question the report doesn’t quite answer is where the steps on that staircase get built. The consultation, welcome as it is, gathers opinion. The People’s Panel of 120 deliberates. Both matter. But neither tells you what happens when real people actually use a digital ID in daily life.
That gap between what people think they’ll think and what actually happens is the very same gap that has sunk every major digital transformation programme of the last 20 or more years. Gov.uk Verify failed in that gap. The eVisa rollout, with several hundred thousand calls to its resolution centre and a system-wide outage last August, is falling into it now.
Closing the gap by testing bold policy without breaking things
There is an ideal place in England where that gap can be closed. The Isle of Wight is geographically bounded, with three monitored ferry gateways. Its population of 140,000 is served by a single local authority and a defined NHS footprint. It is, in effect, a contained and manageable environment in which civil servants can engage with citizens and businesses to conduct serious digital modelling and run small-scale pilots, across departments, simultaneously, on policies that genuinely improve people’s lives.
The last point matters. The island carries a lot of unmeasured and unnoticed deprivation, and the cost of that deprivation falls disproportionately on the public purse per head of population. Many other coastal communities across the South-West, the East of England, the North-East and beyond share parts of the same picture, where standard formulas treat hard water borders and isolation as if they do not exist.
What the island offers the government is far more than just a place to try digital ID. It is somewhere to try almost any policy that needs evidence and efficacy before it is scaled
The island simply reflects these characteristics in their clearest form. Its demographic profile runs roughly 15 years ahead of the UK average on the ageing curve. Its residents pay an invisible “island tax” on the cost of living, driven by ferry costs that affect everything from groceries to building materials. Its young people face a physical barrier to education and employment that no mainland intervention can replicate or properly test.
Because the island’s needs are acute and long underinvested, any good policy improvement shows up quickly. The data is not corrupted by interaction with neighbouring authorities, which means the signal is cleaner and the evidence base it generates more reliable – for the island, for other coastal constituencies, and for the country.
What this offers the government is far more than just a place to try digital ID. It is somewhere to try almost any policy that needs evidence and efficacy before it is scaled and to do so across departmental boundaries rather than in silos.
The Treasury could test a revised Index of Multiple Deprivation that captures geographic isolation properly, addressing the long-standing complaint that the standard formula treats a five-mile ferry crossing as if it were a five-mile road.
The Department for Transport could trial fare-cap and public-utility ferry models that would otherwise have to be debated indefinitely. The Department of Health and Social Care could pilot the AI-driven remote diagnostics it will need everywhere as the rest of the country ages into the island’s current demographic shape.
The Department for Work and Pensions could test whether transport costs really do drive the benefit trap, and the Department for Education could try island-weighted teacher salaries in a controlled environment.
For islanders, this is not a research project imposed on them, and it is emphatically not about treating them as test subjects. It is the most credible, practical and inclusive route to addressing problems that Westminster has been promising to fix for decades and has never quite delivered on.
Ferry costs, NHS access, social mobility, school attainment, the cost of living – these are not abstractions on the island. They are daily realities. For the people of the Isle of Wight, this is about a community that has been overlooked for decades – like so many across the country – finally getting the attention it has long needed, and in the process helping to build a more effective form of policymaking that works for everyone.
Turning “test and learn” into reality
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Darren Jones, committed in the House of Commons in April to engage with the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn and Grow network on exactly this proposition. That commitment was made in response to a supplementary question from the Isle of Wight West MP, Richard Quigley, citing our previous article.
It now sits awaiting follow-through, along with a parallel proposal already with Cabinet Office officials. The Home Affairs Committee report makes that follow-through urgent. The committee has told the government, in essence, that it needs an evidence base, a credible roadmap, and a way to demonstrate that public trust is being built rather than assumed. The Isle of Wight provides all three.
There is always a temptation in Whitehall, when faced with a sceptical select committee report, to respond with further commitments, another consultation, a refined timeline, an updated framework. Those responses will not, by themselves, answer the committee. What will address the committee’s concerns is the ability to point to a place where the next stage of the policy is being tested in the open, on willing participants, with measurable outcomes.
The island has spent decades being treated as a problem to be solved. It is now positioned to become the country’s most valuable policy asset, for digital ID first, and for a much wider set of policy improvements that the country’s coastal and rural communities cannot afford to keep waiting for.
The Island Lab is not a competitor to the consultation or the People’s Panel. It is the third leg of the stool – consultation gathers opinion, deliberation tests reasoning, and a bounded testbed generates evidence. None of the three is sufficient on its own. All three together would represent the most rigorous policy development process this country has applied to a major digital programme in living memory. The Home Affairs committee has set out what good looks like. The island is where good gets built.
The tired old, pre-digital, status quo approach to policymaking — announce grand plans first, model later, scale before evidence — is not the answer. The country’s coastal and rural communities cannot afford to keep waiting for the improvements that Westminster has been promising, and failing, to deliver for a generation or more.
The Isle of Wight offers a way to start testing and driving real change now. The government should take it.
James Findlay is a former CTO/CIO in the UK government. He is the author of the Isle of Wight Living Lab proposal, which advocates for the island’s designation as a Special Policy Zone for cross-departmental government trials.
