GOV.UK Verify

» see gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk-verify as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Almost nothing in this graveyard came with an audit. Companies die and the gap between what they promised and what they delivered stays inside the building. Verify is different because the customer was a government, so the National Audit Office measured the gap and published it in march 2019, four years before the thing actually stopped.

The idea was reasonable enough. The Government Digital Service did not want to run a national identity database, an argument Britain had already had loudly in the 2000s and lost interest in. So Verify pushed the checking out to certified private companies, the Post Office and Digidentity among them, and the state would just buy an assurance that you were who you said. Public beta opened on 14 october 2014 and it went live on 24 may 2016.

i have never had to prove my identity to the British state, so there is no personal thread here at all. What made me read the file is the shape of the failure, which is one an engineer recognizes immediately. The architecture was defensible and the thing it had to do in practice, match a real person to records that were never designed to be matched, was the part nobody had priced properly.

~ the record ~

~ the numbers were audited ~

GDS forecast in 2016 that 25 million people would be using Verify by april 2020. At february 2019 the figure was 3.6 million. Expected financial benefits over the same window were cut from £873 million down to £217 million, which is a reduction of more than three quarters made by the team that produced the original number.

The cost to december 2018 was £154 million, and the auditors noted this was probably an undercount because it excluded what departments spent reshaping their own systems to accept it. The success rate for actually verifying a user was 47 percent as of october 2018. More than half the people who tried to prove who they were could not, and were sent back to a phone line or a paper form.

~ why it did not take ~

Identity checking against commercial data works well for people with a long credit record and a stable address. It works badly for the young and for anyone who has moved around a lot, which is a large fraction of the people who most need to claim something from a government. The system was best at verifying the citizens who needed it least.

The other half was that departments never wanted it. HMRC kept its own Government Gateway and other services quietly built their own routes, so Verify was competing inside the same government that had commissioned it. By the last year there were three services left on the platform. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority and the auditors had both recommended pulling the plug well before anyone did.

~ the next chapter ~

The last government service stopped using Verify on 30 march 2023 and the platform closed the following month, with the identity assurance blog signing off in april. GOV.UK One Login took over, built inside government rather than bought from certified suppliers, which reverses the founding decision of the whole program.

Nine years of work produced a functioning system that the state then decided to build again a different way. The pieces that survive are the standards work and a very detailed public record of how the estimate and the outcome diverged. Most projects this size are buried with the numbers still sealed.

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