The government has dropped plans to make it compulsory to have digital ID in order to prove a right to work, the BBC understands.

Digital checks on a person’s right to work will be mandatory but workers will not have to offer a digital ID and will be able to use other documents such as a passport.

This marks a shift from last year when the government first announced the policy and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told an audience: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said “Good riddance. It was a terrible policy anyway.”

She said the move by Labour represented “another U-turn”.

When it first announced the policy plan, the government had argued that mandatory digital ID for workers would make it easier to clamp down on immigrants working illegally.

The scheme, it is understood, will now deal less narrowly with immigration and focus more on improving access to public services.

Asked about the issue at an Institute for Government conference earlier on Tuesday, Darren Jones, the minister responsible for rolling out the policy, said it would be a “route to the digital transformation of customer-facing public services”.

He said a consultation would be launched “very shortly”, adding: “I’m confident this time next year the polling will be in a much better place on digital ID than it is today.”

The Liberal Democrats said the policy was “doomed to failure” from the start and called for “the billions of pounds earmarked for their mandatory digital ID scheme” to be spent “on the NHS and frontline policing instead”.

The party’s Cabinet Office spokesperson, Lisa Smart, said: “No 10 must be bulk ordering motion sickness tablets at this rate to cope with all their U-turns.”

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said in a post on X: “This is a victory for individual liberty against a ghastly, authoritarian government. Reform UK would scrap it altogether.”

Green Party leader Zack Polanski welcomed the news on X, saying: “The government have U-turned on ID cards. Good.”