At least six million people in the UK can be classed as ID challenged, meaning they likely struggle to access government services like Universal Credit, the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) has found.

Government and private sector services often rely on users having a passport, driving licence, online banking, or non-bank credit account. But there are millions of people in the UK without identification such as a passport or drivers’ licences, which means they cannot validate or verify themselves on services like Gov.uk Verify.

According to 2019 figures from the National Audit Office Report, the Government Digital Service (GDS) reported a verification success rate of only 48 per cent (Feb 2019), meaning over half of those using Verify were not able to sign up to GDS on their first attempt, if at all.

The same data showed that despite Universal Credit being the government service most reliant on Verify, of the 70 per cent of claimants who tried to authenticate their identity through Verify, only 38 per cent were able to do so.

“Digital ID will only work if it’s truly inclusive and that means opening up access to more datasets, often government data,” said Nick Mothershaw, chief identify strategist, OIX. “Anyone who wants to use a Digital ID to access services should be able to create one, and the process of setting it up should be as easy as possible.”

“Our unique analysis has revealed that using traditional ID documents or just the currently available data sources, a staggering number of people will be excluded as they will struggle to set up a Digital ID.”

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