Gov.UK Verify Underperforming – National Audit Office Reports

Gov.UK Verify is a federated identity scheme, created to provide easier and secure access to digital government services. GDS (Government Digital Service) had high hopes that their digital identities would be widely used by now. The initial target was to have 25 million digital IDs by 2020.

A Gov.UK Verify report released by the National Audit Office finds that only 5.4m people will create a digital identity by 2020. The success rate reported by GDS is just 48% compared with the originally estimated 90%. The success rates have come at no surprise to some, to meet requirements as stringent as those set out in GPG45 a success rate of 90% is impossible.

Key to the success of a scheme such as this is the success rate, consumers must be able to create a digital ID with ease. Once the digital ID has been created a consumer can re-use the identity for many other services.

The service itself is provided by commercial partners, GDS manage scheme and commercials. The participants are Post Office, Barclays, Experian, Digidentity and Idemia.