Speeches by Onwurah.

“Do you understand the investment in digital systems or infrastructure that it will require from your members?”

“You can see that there might be a challenge for small businesses. Alex Hall-Chen, are any of your members currently using digital forms of right-to-work checks? If so, are they increasing efficiency, and what are the costs involved?”

“Does that business need to have digital infrastructure? Do they need to have secure web providers or something like that?”

“Thank you very much for enabling me to guest on this inquiry. I am very interested in the costs and implications of the transition to mandatory digital right-to-work checks. I will start with you, David Crack. I understand that only 23% of employer right-to-work checks use your members. Can you tell us about the costs …”

“So if I am a small business and I want to use a digital verification provider, it could cost me between £1 and £6 per check?”

“That is a really moving story. Part of the challenge here is that for those non-British and Irish citizens who do not have a stable right to work, a stable proof of ID is something very important that they look for, but many British citizens who automatically have a right to work object to that exact same feature—it is…”

“That is a digital ID, and the Government are not making digital ID mandatory. Maybe this is a technical question, but can you have stable tokens without having a stable digital ID?”

“But your right to work is not necessarily stable if you are on a visa; it can change.”

“The proposal now is for mandatory right-to-work checks, but without a mandatory digital ID, so there would not necessarily be one identifier. The issues that you are talking about would carry on, because there would not necessarily be one identifier for a right-to-work check.”

“But you said that they have tried to clean up the data that underpins it. What can Committees such as mine look for or ask for to have confidence that lessons have been learned, and the data has been cleaned?”

“So an order of magnitude higher in terms of numbers.”

“I am just trying to get an idea of where we are going from: from 10 million eVisas, and if a digital ID is for the entire—”

“On a point of clarification, do the Government—as opposed to private providers like yourself—currently use a digital form of ID for work verification checks?”

“Just to clarify, how many eVisas are there?”

“Can I just say that joined-up government is a challenge? Joining up legacy systems of the numbers that you spoke about, Dr Jablonowski—I think you said that 90 legacy systems were being used.”

“What is our entire working-age population?”

“So the provision of using a Government digital ID is something entirely new in terms of the right to work.”

“So that is underlying the eVisa system. We heard from the previous panel that the Government currently does not provide any form of digital ID for British and Irish citizens. And the eVisa system is for non-British and Irish Citizens. You have described very vividly some of the failures of the system. Q100   …”

“I congratulate my hon. Friend on freeing so many of my constituents from the historical and, indeed, feudal injustice of the leasehold system. I urge him to ignore the clarion complaints of those freeholders who predicated their business model on the continued exploitation of working people through extortionate ground …”

“T2. The three-year local government funding settlement is a welcome return to long-term planning. Newcastle city council faces a 34% rise in adult social care costs, compared with only a 15% rise in core spending power. That is taking more and more money away from the many services that my constituents depend upon. Wil…”