Digital identity and the UK government’s announceability problem

Digital identity and digital credentials are a critical part of the infrastructure for next-generation public services. If you want to enable public services that are proactive, save people time and join up in new ways, you need forms of digital identity.

To use a football cliche, if it had been on target, the UK government's recent announcement on digital identity would have been an easy goal. Much of the work to create systems to let users 1) sign in to government services, 2) verify they are who they say they are, and 3) get digital versions of their government credentials was already well underway in the form of GOV.UK One Login and the GOV.UK Wallet. The Blueprint for Modern Digital Government, published in January, included the bold but achievable target of incrementally making available digital versions of all paper- and card-based credentials and entitlements by the end of 2027. In short, much of the hard work was already underway.

In the search for announcibility, tying it to the issue of immigration, and allowing the language of a singular 'ID card' to permeate, the government appeared to abandon the radical incrementalism and replace it with the sort of big bang tech announcement we all hoped were of the past. It also risked creating inertia for those teams in government who are already delivering. The inertia created by competing priorities, combined with a very particular, British, passive approach to calling out those contradictions, is toxic to delivery in the UK civil service.

While the initial announcement has been followed by more nuanced comms that explain that digital identity won't be mandatory, and how it will reduce admin burdens on the public, it all feels very reactive, attempting to make good on the initial announcement. The heavily trailed 'BritCard' naming also seems to have been abandoned, but the paradigm of a singular digital identity card seems to have stuck.

On the more positive side, the announcement does represent a rare (very rare, in fact ) example of backing for digital public infrastructure coming from the top of the UK government. Head-of-government backing is one of the requirements for success in digital government, and we see it from the likes of India, Ukraine and Estonia. So, that has to be recognised and welcomed.

It is also an (even rarer) attempt of a government recognising the role of public design in shaping the people's sense of identity. I've written in Platformland about how people value digital versions of things like books less than their physical counterparts, and that we have not yet understood how to design for 'psychological ownership' over public services, as we replace paper forms and licences with digital counterparts. However clumsy the ’Britcard’ label was, it appeared to acknowledge the potential digital has to create something beyond utilitarianism.

Back to the negatives for a second, many of these could have been mitigated by having a bit more product thinking attached to the announcement. Despite the world leading talent working in digital in the UK public sector, digital remains misunderstood at senior levels of government, and the people who can help them understand it remain too many steps removed to do so. It's very rare, for example, to find someone in a digital product role above grade 6, and those with more senior digital roles often come from generic management consultancy or policy backgrounds, rather than having hand on experience of digital.

A more product led announcement might have gone something like this:

1. Identity cards are a 1990s concept, this is different because it's not the identity that's interesting, it's the credentials it gives you access to and what you can do with them
2. Here's a live demo of how it will work and how it will feel, including right to work as one of several examples
3. We are also publishing a technical white paper that explains how it will protect people from misuse
4. Here's how it will save people and businesses time and money
5. Here's how we'll make it simple and cheaper for departments, devolved administrations, councils and other organisations to issue and check digital credentials
6. We know from other countries that getting onboarding right is the critical, so here's how we are going to make that simple
7. This is not a big IT project, we already have teams delivering it

That point about onboarding is particularly critical. Anyone who has followed India's attempts to link Aadhaar to the Income Tax Department's PAN Card, or Australia's efforts to link MyGov ID with company records, knows the potential that poor experiences and mandates can generate a drip-drip of negative stories. There's potential here for some novel design approaches here, for example having draft versions of people's credentials appear in a digital wallet as an indicator that something needs to be done. The government could issue a draft right to work credential to everyone through the GOV.UK Wallet. It would be greyed out as an indicator that action needs to be taken to activate it. For as many as possible, it would be automatically enabled once a related transaction (such as renewing a passport) has been completed.

More digital product thinking up front when governments announce new initiatives is only part of the answer. But the main reason announcements like the digital identity one are problematic is that, in search of quick headline dopamine fixes, those advising ministers constrain the opportunity for effective service design and delivery.

The things that help journalists understand and communicate a concept, are, more often than not, not the ones that make for good product design. Take the idea of a single ‘card’ and a separate right to work credential, which will also likely be represented as a digital card. It’s easy to imagine an interaction along the lines of:

Call centre: Do you have a X card on your phone?
User: Yes.
Call centre: Sorry, that's the X card app, not the X card.
User: So what's the X card?
Call centre: It's the thing that lives in the X card app, but you don't have one.
User: How do I get one?
Call centre: First sign in using the unique number...
User: can I sign in using the X card?
Call centre: No, only some people ..

We’ve seen a similar thing with announcements around the NHS App, which included concepts like “My Vaccines” and “Doctor in your pocket”. Those may or may not be good ways to get users to act in a way that leads to the intent of the policy that sits behind them. The risk is, once announced in capital letters, they stick.

Digital public services and infrastructure are complex sociotechnical systems. Getting them right is the result of thousands of small product design decisions. Policy professionals are not product specialists. To ensure the civil service is delivering what they want, ministers need to get much closer to product delivery teams — and demand that announcements they sign off on give teams the space they need to deliver at speed, not create inertia.