The Hidden Digital Identifier: The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and the Need for Resistance

Parliament is quietly advancing a piece of legislation that, beneath the language of safeguarding, establishes the legal framework for a national digital identifier for children. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024–26, currently before the House of Lords, inserts into the Children Act 1989 new sections empowering the Secretary of State to mandate a “consistent identifier for children.”¹

The definition is deliberately broad: a number or code of “general application” which must be included in information processed by schools, local authorities, safeguarding partners, or any “designated” body.² Regulations will later determine which identifier is chosen. At present, ministers have admitted to piloting the NHS number for this purpose.³ Once fixed, this number would follow a child across agencies, linking records and enabling data to be shared at scale.

The measure is presented as an aid to child protection and welfare. But critics note that such a framework, once created, will not be easily confined to safeguarding. A unique identifier for children is a digital key: it links education, health, social services, and potentially any future database. The Bill also grants ministers the power to expand the list of “designated” bodies required to use it. The potential scope is vast.

Proponents, including the Children’s Commissioner, argue this will close information gaps that have hindered responses to serious cases of neglect or abuse.⁴ Yet civil liberties groups warn that creating a national digital identity system through secondary legislation, without robust parliamentary debate, risks normalising surveillance of the youngest members of society.⁵ The Bill provides that data protection law still applies, but the reality is that once a system exists, it can be widened. The danger lies not merely in the initial identifier, but in its inevitable expansion.

The timing is no coincidence. Alongside this Bill, the Government has already announced a broader digital identity programme, including a smartphone “digital wallet” for adults that will be mandatory for Right-to-Work checks by the end of the Parliament.⁶ What is now presented as a technical measure for safeguarding children is in fact a preparatory stage in building a culture of digital ID across society.

For Christians and for all citizens concerned with liberty, this raises serious questions. Catholic social teaching recognises the need for the State to uphold the common good, but also insists upon the dignity of the person and the primacy of the family. To reduce children to digital codes managed by the State, with parents excluded from meaningful debate, is to subordinate the natural society of the family to a bureaucratic machine. It is a technocratic solution imposed from above, rather than a true reform of social care or a renewal of moral culture.

The danger is that “safeguarding” becomes a catch-all justification for the erosion of privacy and the imposition of surveillance. In reality, what protects children is not another database but the presence of strong families, moral formation, and communities where virtue is taught and safeguarded. A State that cannot secure these foundations instead turns to control.

It is therefore imperative that the public resist this measure. The petition before Parliament calls for rejection of the digital identifier clauses of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and for protection of children’s freedom and privacy.⁷ Citizens have a duty to act now before the framework is quietly entrenched and extended.

If passed unopposed, this legislation will mark a profound shift: the normalisation of digital identity, beginning with the youngest. What is presented as a tool for welfare today may tomorrow become the architecture of control.

✍️ The petition can be signed here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722377

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¹ Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, HL Bill 51, Clause 4, inserting ss.16LA–16LB into the Children Act 1989.
² ibid., s.16LB.
³ House of Lords, Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill debates (2025); see also Government statements on NHS number pilots.
⁴ Children’s Commissioner for England, “Family Review” recommendations, 2022.
⁵ Civil liberties analysis in response to the Bill, September 2025.
⁶ Cabinet Office, Digital Identity programme announcements, 2024–25.
⁷ Petition to Parliament, “Stop Digital ID for Children,” 2025: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722377.