GOV.UK One Login rolling out across government

The UK government has issued more than 1.5 million verified identities on its digital identity platform, GOV.UK One Login. More than 815,000 people now have GOV.UK One Login accounts that can now be accessed using authenticator apps.

There are now eight services using the platform, added Natalie Jones OBE, director of digital identity at the Government Digital Service (GDS) (pictured), in an update.

They are:

• Disclosure and Barring Service: Request a basic check
• Department for Business and Trade: Licensing for International Trade and Enterprise
• Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency: Apply for your vehicle operator licence
• Social Work England: Register to be a social worker
• HM Revenue and Customs: Government Gateway services (via the identity checking app)
• HM Land Registry: Sign your mortgage deed
• Ofqual: Apply to be an advisor
• Modern Slavery Unit: Modern slavery statement registry

“We have driving licence and passport based routes for users, with both forms of ID able to be used with our identity checking app or via a web journey,” said Jones. “Our identity check apps have now been downloaded over two million times and we’ve issued over 1.5 million verified identities since our first users last summer. More than 815,000 individuals now have GOV.UK One Login accounts that can now be accessed using authenticator apps as one of their factors. We’re accepting overseas telephone numbers for One Time Passwords, and we’ve got Welsh Language versions.”

Jones said GDS has three times the number of teams working in parallel on features and incremental improvements to existing functionality. “We’re making over 500 separate releases a month to production through our automated pipeline. We’re running continuous discovery sessions in parallel to development and have conducted over 100 end user research sessions in the last six months alone,” she said.

GDS has also focused on broadening the reach of the service to users who don’t have a driving licence or passport as well as those with low digital skills, she said. GDS plans to open a face-to-face route for identity verification in the summer, which will allow users with additional forms of identification to prove their identities to a medium GPG 45 profile, providing its first asynchronous journey.

GDS is also currently finalising plans for its first ‘low’ profiles and our first ‘medium profile’ that won’t need users to have any form of photo ID at all.

GOV.UK Verify put out to pasture

GOV.UK One Login’s predecessor, GOV.UK Verify, was retired in December 2022. With its last service migrating away in March, the service has now been decommissioned.

“The lessons learned from GOV.UK Verify formed a core part of the thinking around the way we have set up and been running GOV.UK One Login,” said Jones. “We’ve been focussed on increasing user success rates from the GOV.UK Verify baseline since we first went into beta last summer. Our user-level data shows that for our most popular service we’re achieving an identity verification rate of 62 percent, which is a huge achievement for a platform that didn’t exist 12 months ago. This is over 10 percent higher than the target rates agreed with the service before it onboarded.”

Over the next 18 months GDS will onboard “the vast bulk” of government services, she added.

To stay in touch with GOV.UK One Login developments, register today to attend our Think Digital Identity for Government conference in Westminster on October 10th, where Natalie Jones will give the latest update on the initiative.