Fact Check:

Online ‘GOV.UK Verify programme:Written statement - HCWS978’ by Oliver Dowden (Minister for Implementation. 09 Oct 2018.) https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2018-10-09/HCWS978/

Frank Joshi, director at Mvine, said:

The Minister for Implementation makes it sound like it was always planned to be this way. It wasn’t. But Oliver Dowden’s written statement to the Commons, repeated by Lord Young to the Lords, comes as very good news indeed.

Progress on assuring mass adoption of digital identity under the Verify flag has been held back by vacillation and opacity within central Government which almost kyboshed the entire scheme on more than one occasion.

You can only admire the seven Identity Providers who invested in the first round for staying with it despite the volumes of citizen sign-ups to Verify mooted by Cabinet Office never materialising. Those IDPs who stay with the Verify scheme for this next period of 18 months will see a pay-back for their trouble.

Government proactively turning Verify over to the private sector is not an admission of failure but a clear signal that it recognises what most of us already know: the private sector is able to deliver technological innovation at a pace and a quality that is now needed.

Privacy campaigners have nothing to fear. The private sector is able to assure no back-doors exist in any of the technical and functional components which make up the sub-system.

For our part, as a Hub Service Provider, we’ll continue to assure the tool that makes the sub-system work in harmony is available for Identity Providers and for Service Providers in the public and private sector whose job it is to work together to build the open market for digital identity.

I hope that progress already made toward a ubiquitous, Verify-compliant and truly interoperable digital identity based on citizen consent is not forgotten.

It’s all about making sure that every citizen has the opportunity to have a digital identity. In the coming 18 months that Government has funding for, the framework for that is what they need to put in place. And that behoves DCMS and GDS to settle their differences and engage fully with the private sector so that details of frameworks can be worked out in a civilised way, not like a ‘wild west’.

That is why the most pragmatic way forward for the private sector is a consortium, working as a healthy ecosystem toward a common goal, to digitally enable the whole of society. The technology sub system which powers this will become part of Critical National Infrastructure. That means GCHQ and NCSC will need to engage with private sector too.

In 18 months time, as the private sector is allowed to do what it is best at – create a market and scale it up – then the volumes of citizen sign-ups will be higher. Price per citizen identity will be significantly lower in 2020 than the price today; it's simply economies of scale, but you must have the scale.

Government will be a consumer of digital identity not a provider of it. They are on the record as having said exactly that. [Fact Check: Nic Harrison on 18 May 2018] Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Government wants to offload the capital cost of the infrastructure to the private sector but it can only do that if it allows the private sector to arrange itself the way it needs to work - open competition guided by market rules and Government-assured framework.

The key factor often overlooked in the critique of Verify is this: mass adoption didn’t happen because (i) Government didn’t raise public awareness for it, and (ii) of those who did commence the sign-up only 40% completed the process. User experience has been the pivot here. The inconvenience of the initial sign-up process must be outweighed by a benefit. Other than on one episode with HMRC, citizens were given no real incentive to push through to the end of the sign-up process.