Most European governments run national identity schemes which typically involve centrally-run public sector databases and national ID Cards. The growth of digital services has motivated governments to implement eID cards to allow their citizens to assert their identity for remote digital services. The UK Government closed its national ID card scheme in 2010. The core of the innovation for GOV.UK Verify is to place the citizen in control of their identity and protect their privacy. This approach is completely opposite to traditional governmental thinking for services where the Government is able to track a citizen's activity. Research has shown that the willingness for citizens to engage when the state is involved is very limited.

By placing the citizen at the heart of the design of GOV.UK Verify, it recognizes the citizens' needs for trustworthy identity across both public and private sector services of which the state represents only about 20% of that need. During the design of GOV.UK Verify an innovative approach was taken to the engagement with the critic (such as No to ID) to the national identity scheme. The program set up a Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group (PCAG) and included these critics and involved them in the design of the service in order to provide the citizen with choice and control. GOV.UK Verify has taken a federated approach to identity allowing the citizen to choose which organization to engage with.

The procurement approach was also innovative and was based on private sector investment based on risk. The Cabinet Office approach was to be the aggregator of demand across the public sector to allow the private sector to agree their business cases to invest. The innovation in defining the standards and the architecture was also strategic as it has set the path towards global interoperability so that citizens can be trusted by digital services anywhere.

Another core innovation that is now being understood across the public sector is that citizen controlled trustworthy digital identity is core enable data sharing defined in the Government Digital Strategy. Once the remote identity is trusted by multiple parties (due to the alignment on standards) it is possible to enable the citizen to share their own data (as they do today) without the need for complex data sharing agreements between government departments.

GOV.UK Verify is at the core stage of both Implementing and evaluating projects. However, there are multiple subprojects which use an agile delivery methodology running concurrently, therefore, each sub-project is at a different stage of delivery. The ambition at the core of the 2017 UK Digital Strategy is, “to create a world-leading digital economy that works for everyone.” Further, we recognize that “One of the most important and challenging aspects of delivering transformed online services is identity assurance - establishing that the user is who they say they are and not someone pretending to be them.”

GOV.UK Verify plays a major part in fulfilling this ambition by enabling citizens to easily establish a digital identity and then use that identity to access government services to a level of trust not previously available. GOV.UK Verify is a live service which connects 1.5M users to 12 Government Services. In Nov 2017 the first private sector service will be connected to Verify. This current status represents an early MVP of the final proposition whereby UK Citizens will be able to assert a trustworthy digital identity to public or private sector services anywhere in the world. Any global citizen who has a nationally supported trustworthy digital identity can access public and private sector services in the UK.

The need for digital identity and the challenges faced by the UK started with the collapse of the UK National Identity Scheme. Also opportunities were being created through changing dynamics in the market such as the rise of Facebook and resulting awareness of the needs for privacy, growth of internet adoption and the increasing penetration of the smartphone.

The idea was born from the realisation that the identity scheme needed to be the ‘opposite’ of a state-led identity scheme where the user is in control and their privacy is protected. At a political level, engaging in the identity landscape presented a risk, and it took the far-sighted Minister of the Cabinet Office, Lord Francis Maude, to understand the problem area and take on the political risk of sponsoring the project. Political level support allowed the project to get the funding it required to move forward. The methods, or key principles, used by the project was one of openness and transparency with the market.

The engagement with the Open Identity Exchange at an executive level enabled the project to explore many investigations into the way that the final solution should be done. Multiple Discovery and Alpha projects were conducted and opened up to public scrutiny through a transparent process. This allowed core innovation to flow into the design of the service. The initial success criteria were to deliver the GOV.UK proposition, start connecting to services and acquire the first million. This was achieved and the success metric has now been set to acquire 25 million users by 2020. The innovation is being spread to others by opening up a trustworthy data market in the UK.

New innovative projects have started whereby a trustworthy digital identity can be used to unlock both public and private sector data. The best example of this is The Pensions Dashboard project which is proposing to allow a citizen to view an aggregated view of their of all their pension data. This requires a GOV.UK Verify trustworthy digital identity to be used to release data from 260 private sector pension providers as well as the UK Government’s Department of Work and Pensions for the state pension. Without the standards for trustworthy identity and an operating service, this innovation would not be possible.

GOV.UK Verify was delivered in collaboration between the public and private sector. The Verify team delivered the integration point to government services and the private sector companies the identity provider technology and operational environments. In order for the end to end trust to be possible, it was essential for the teams to work together.

This included the Verify standards and operational team to work with the private sector teams to ensure that they were able to meet the standards and onboarding to the Verify integration point securely. The innovation was in the collaboration between both public and private sectors to achieve a trustworthy environment. User research and design was essential to learn and develop product/innovation to make it as usable as possible. This could only be achieved through collaboration with users.

Core to GOV.UK Verify was to place the citizen at the center of the service and therefore understanding their feedback was essential. Multiple user research activities were conducted and the feedback fed into an agile and iterative delivery process. As privacy is a key aspect to identity it was essential to engage with the Privacy, Consumer and Advisory Group to get specific views on Privacy.

This group of experts was key to representing the consumer’s view on how the solution should be delivered to protect privacy. GDS became a board member on the Open Identity Exchange with the goal of driving innovation and projects in the private sector in relation to organizations delivering identity services. This has resulted in innovation in the market to ensure that the public sector is procuring is buying the best of breed solution. GDS also engaged with Departments to gather specific requirements for each service to provide ideas for innovation.

GDS has a principal focus on the user. At the root of Verify is the desire to create something that is more than just an identity system, but something that provides a safe, secure, and simple service that will enable people in the UK to experience better lives through access to the services they need the most. We are starting out on this journey but are already seeing an impact in areas such as redundancy payments and Universal Credit. In the near future, local government and health and social care services are due to follow. The act of creating Verify and the standards that surround it have had a profound effect on the identity ecosystem, both nationally and internationally.

Verified identity is a basic building block of the digital economy enabling users to interact with greater safety and surety but also providing a means for more meaningful digital transformation. An example of this is the ability to unlock trusted attribute data about an individual based on their verified identity so that data sharing is minimised and eligibility satisfied digitally and instantly where before drawn-out manual processes were the norm. Having created services in partnership with other providers such as the Blue Badge service for disabled parking permits, we have seen how verified identity and attribute services can turn a 10-week process into a 10-minute wonder.

From an international standard, perspective Verify accounts created for UK citizens now will have the possibility of being used internationally in the future. We understand the importance of digital identity has not only in the public but also the private sector and how many services our citizens use that are not based in the UK as part of their everyday online life. Working with international standards organizations and other governments we have forged relationships and influenced standards that have led to the potential to interoperate with the USA, Canada, and the EU, and many more will follow.

The key challenge for GOV.UK Verify has been to engage with Government Departments and to convince them to adopt the service. As with all Government services it is always challenging for them to think of a customer-centric solution rather than a department-centric solution. This culture is slowly changing as Verify is being adopted. One of the challenges for the GOV.UK Verify team was to be able to innovate in a collaborative way across the public and private sector.

By joining the board of OIX, GDS was able to drive forward innovation in an open, collaborative and transparent way. Proactive engagement with customers and understanding requirements from services, needs, and expectations from industry and local authorities have ensured continuous innovation. Scaling the service to a national scale is a challenge as the number of services is low however when citizens can use their identity across both public and private sectors it is expected to ramp significantly.

It is essential to be solving a significant problem that has been clearly defined and agreed by all stakeholders before defining solutions to the problem. This allows a vision to be created and provides the strategic direction as the project progresses. This is then the basis of the understanding the value of the product to both the citizens but the wider Government/industry.

Stay specific and focused offering (a digital identity which can be added to other products - not needing to redesign products as a whole). The real value from leadership in Government for standards and product development and a real culture of collaboration.

The core innovation of thinking about the citizen-first and placing them in direct control of their data could be leveraged across government departments for other citizen-facing services. The transition from service led design to design informed by the needs of the citizen is challenging but essential. This is a cultural shift for many Government departments. Engagement of critics early on in the design process is also something that could be replicated.

There is a significant value of working with contrasting stakeholders to ensure a balanced delivery. This includes engages with critics and skeptics. A transparent approach to engagement across the public and private sector ensures that all stakeholders are taken on the journey. GOV.UK Verify is all about ‘Thinking Differently’ and there will always be people with vested interests to ensure that it doesn't succeed. When you are trying to change something that will have a significant impact on people’s lives - it’s hard but keep going.