Britain’s National Audit Office has published a lessons-learned report on digital identity, finding that the obstacles to proving who you are across government services sit in legacy systems and fragmented data rather than in the cancelled digital ID scheme itself.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham scrapped the digital identity plans on entering Downing Street in July. The audit office argues the underlying question did not go with them.
“Despite the government’s recent announcement that it will not be going ahead with its digital identity plans, questions about how people can conveniently and securely prove who they are or something about themselves in a digital world remain relevant,” said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO.
The report treats digital identity as an ecosystem rather than a product: services, credentials, standards, providers and governance arrangements spanning government and the private sector. On that reading the UK has a solid foundation in legislation and standards, with inconsistency persisting across departments and individual services.
The specific constraint is record linkage. Public services use different identifiers, among them National Insurance numbers, Unique Taxpayer References and NHS numbers. Establishing a trusted digital identity is only half the problem; government then has to connect that identity to the right record inside each service, and inconsistent data standards mean the same person can be represented differently from one system to the next.
Davies pointed to overseas experience for what makes adoption work, saying digital identity succeeds where people find it useful in everyday life and where security and privacy protections are effective.
The report also flags a design question that will outlast the cancellation. As other countries move towards phone-based wallets, reusable credentials and cross-sector identity systems, decisions about interoperability and standards become more consequential for whatever the UK builds next.
Its closing lessons are addressed to a future attempt: define the objectives, define the delivery model, and deal with the legacy systems and fragmented data that would otherwise limit what any digital identity could achieve.
The audit lands while the machinery built under the previous approach continues, including the Digital Verification Services trust framework that governs certified private-sector identity providers.
Sources: UKAuthority, National Audit Office
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By Ali Nassar-Smith
