Nearly there...
We’ve been working for the last year towards taking GOV.UK Verify through public beta development and into live.
We’re very nearly there. We’ve finished the technical work we need to do to go live and we’re in the process of completing the final steps before removing the beta label. We haven’t yet finished the Service Standard assessment process (the last action required before we can remove the beta branding) and we’re hoping to conclude that shortly.
Live will not be a dramatic change. It’s part of an ongoing gradual process of developing and scaling up the service and GOV.UK Verify will actually look exactly the same to users, apart from the removal of the beta label.
The rest of this post is an update on all the things we have done in readiness for live, and the progress we’ve made since our last update in February.
Services continuing to adopt GOV.UK Verify - more coming soon
GOV.UK Verify is ready and able to accommodate all the services that need to adopt it in central government as well as devolved services in Wales and Northern Ireland.
We’re working with teams across government (DVLA, HMRC, BIS, DWP, DVSA, and Home Office) to bring in a range of new services that will let users do new things safely and securely online with GOV.UK Verify.
Over 50 government services are planning to adopt GOV.UK Verify. Twenty of these are planning to connect to GOV.UK Verify in the next year. We’ll be publishing a more detailed update to our pipeline - including the number of people we anticipate will use those services - soon.
We’ve got 8 companies
We’ve now got 8 certified companies for users to choose from. The last of these new companies connected in March after completing all the contractual gates and meeting all the requirements in their contract with government.
New methods available, making GOV.UK Verify work more straightforwardly for more people
We’ve blogged separately about the ongoing work we’re doing to understand and increase GOV.UK Verify’s demographic coverage.
GOV.UK Verify can now work for 90% of working adults in the UK, which is the main user group for most of the services currently using GOV.UK Verify at scale. Our coverage is lower among very young people, older people and those who are not working - we will need to make sure GOV.UK Verify works for all these groups as services join that need us to cover people in those groups. We have plans in place to do that.
In the last few months, we’ve seen new data sources and methods being introduced, and we’ve worked with mobile network operators as they’ve developed a new phone contract validation service that’s now in live use in GOV.UK Verify. That means that people can use their mobile phone contract as identity evidence in GOV.UK Verify, in the same way they might use a passport or driving licence.
It’s also now possible to verify your identity without either a passport or driving licence, thanks to a new method introduced by one of our certified companies which allows you to use your bank account as proof of your identity.
Over the next few months, more data sources and methods will be introduced that will continue to expand our demographic coverage - we’ll be blogging more about that soon.
Success rate
We’ve been working towards improving the success rate for people when they first try to verify their identity. We’ve more than doubled the success rate since the start of our public beta (the lowest success rate was 30% in October 2014, and the highest was 77% in January 2016).
We’ve seen success rates in excess of 80% for users of some services. We’ve averaged over 70% success this year so far. We haven’t reached 90% yet. This is an ambitious aim, especially for a service that’s not designed for 100% of journeys to be completed (for example, if you try to fraudulently verify an identity, you should fail). As no-one’s built anything like GOV.UK Verify before, we don’t know if it’s the right target. However, we’ll carry on working towards it and demonstrating ongoing improvement in the coming months - we have lots of work planned that we think will help us make progress.
More than 500,000 identities verified, and GOV.UK Verify has been used 1.3m times
We’re continuing to see more verifications. Since the start of 2016 there’s been an average of 9,700 new verified identity accounts created every week. Last week we saw our 500,000th identity verified.
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