RIP IDA – are GDS talking to themselves?

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but,

just in case it isn't obvious to all,

IDA is dead.

IDA, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",

is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.

And it's dead.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

Every week, the Government Digital Service (GDS) publish statistics about GOV.UK Verify (RIP) on their performance platform. A degree of academic rigour is called for. Without that, GDS are just talking to themselves.

As we speak, some of these statistics are complete to the week 11-17 April 2016 while others include the week 18-24 April 2016. We ignore the latter in the paragraphs below.

1. Total authentications
We ignore the 185,149 basic accounts. These are unverified and have no place in a verified identity assurance system.

User sign-ins went up from 547,416 to 571,191, i.e. there were 23,775 of them during the week.The number of verified accounts went up by 7,509 from 487,267 to 494,776.

Adding the two together – which is GDS's peculiar way – tells us that total authentications went up by 31,284.

2. Authentications per week
Nothing to add.

3. Authentication completion rate
43% for sign-ins and account creations added together. Given that there were 31,284 completed/successful authentications (see 1. above), if that's 43% of all attempted authentications, there must have been 72,753 authentication attempts in all, of which 41,469 failed.

4. Authentication success rate
90% – no idea what this means.

5. Account creation success rate, all services
71%. Given that 7,509 verified accounts were created (see 1. above), if that's 71%, then there must have been 10,576 account creation attempts altogether, of which 3,067 failed.

If GDS intend to enrol 50 million people, say, into GOV.UK Verify (RIP), at the rate of 7,509 per week the job will take 6,659 weeks or 128 years.

It could be worse than that. Those 7,509 verified accounts could be 939 people each creating one account with each of the eight "identity providers". On that basis, 50 million people would need 400 million accounts which could take 1,024 years to create.

Most people die before they're 128, let alone 1,024, which implies that GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s registration job can never be completed.

The advocates of biometrics look for a failure-to-enrol rate (FTE) of less than 1%. Anything higher casts doubt on the credibility of proceeding with that biometric. GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s FTE of 29% makes the feasibility of the system problematic.

Given that a total of 41,469 attempted authentications failed (see 3 above) and that 3,067 of them were attempted account creations, the other 38,402 must have been failed sign-ins.

Given that there were 72,753 authentication attempts (see 3. above) and that 10,576 of them were attempted account creations, there must have been 62,177 attempted sign-ins.

38,402 failures out of 62,177 attempts indicates a 62% false reject rate (FRR). 62% of the time, people are being told that they are not themselves.

That is similar to the FRR for face recognition any time more than six months after the enrolment photograph is inscribed on the register. Face recognition is useless as a biometric. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) looks similarly useless if its FRR really is 62%.

You can reduce the FRR, of course, by making it easier to achieve a match. But that has the effect of increasing the false accept rate (FAR), i.e. it becomes easier for a person to pretend that they're someone else, which is the opposite of GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s objective.

6. Sign-in success rate
99% – no idea what this means.

7. User satisfaction – verification, security, certified company
No data available for the week 11-17 April 2016.

8. Certified company completion rate
55% – no idea what this means. Compare 43%, see 3. above?

-----  o  O  o  -----

4., 6. and 8. above may mean something to GDS but they're talking to themselves – these statistics can mean nothing to anyone else. At 7. above GDS have stopped talking even to themselves.

1., 2., 3. and 5. above broadcast GDS's message loud and clear to anyone listening – GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is a dead duck.

GDS nevertheless plan to announce some time this week that the duck is alive. In their world, perhaps it is. But not here on Terror Firmer, it isn't.

----------

Updated: 11:00

At 29%, GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s failure-to-enrol rate (FTE) is problematic, as noted at 5. above.

GDS are doing what they can to reduce it:

• They have increased the recommended minimum age of people trying to register for an on-line account from 19 to 20. That may reduce the number of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) failures. But at the same time it would cut out 1.2% of the population and thereby reduce the universality of GDS's identity assurance scheme, making it less use to government and less attractive to the private sector, who are being courted by GDS.
• They have also taken to steering people away from the "identity providers" who are less likely to be able to complete enrolment. Again, that may reduce the number of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) failures. But it would do so at the expense of reducing the number and variety of enrolment agents/"identity providers"/"certified companies" when GDS's sales pitch to the populace is precisely that there is a wide and high quality choice on offer.

The other action GDS could take is to change the enrolment process. At the moment, the identity of a given name, address and age with sex optional is verified by reference to passport details, driving licence details and credit history. The enrolment process could be changed to take into account further personal information.

What further personal information?

Candidates include your health records, education records, travel records, bank account transactions, insurance policies, mobile phone usage, email contact lists, social media accounts, ... GDS claimed 18 months ago that they were about to announce their choice of additional personal information to include in the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) enrolment process. They still haven't.

Most people are not often exercised by questions of privacy but GDS's demand for yet more personal information might tip the balance.

Despite GDS's claims to the contrary, we have little or no proven control over these personal details once they have been divulged.

The privacy and fraud risks seem exorbitant compared with the benefit of being able to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to view our driving licence details on-line.

It seems unnecessary to amplify those risks when we already have the Government Gateway as a long-established working alternative to GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

Unnecessary also when, according to GDS, no other country has adopted this approach, the UK is in the vanguard.

In the absence of any additional personal information being added to the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) enrolment process we are left with GDS's eight "identity providers".

Five of them are being branded useless – Barclays, CitizenSafe/GB Group, the Royal Mail, Safran Morpho/SecureIdentity and Verizon. That must sour relations between them and GDS and it might sour relations between them and the three favoured "identity providers" – Digidentity, Experian and the Post Office.

The position of Barclays is odd. You'd think they would be among the best enrolment agents. Whatever percentage of applicants they can shepherd through the registration process should be definitive. Far from consigning Barclays to the out-of-favour list, perhaps GDS should be checking the apparently outperforming Digidentity, Experian and the Post Office to make sure that they aren't relaxing the matching criteria and exacerbating the FAR problem (false accept rate).

With only three favoured "identity providers", GDS are exposed. The Post Office is not a "certified company", its application for approval lapsed well over a year ago. And Digidentity and the Post Office are linked. If one of them suffers a security problem, they would both be knocked out, leaving GOV.UK Verify (RIP) with just one "identity provider" – Experian.

This visible promotion of Experian into the UK Constitution as the "identity provider" of choice for the entire nation has not been even debated by Parliament, let alone agreed. In this matter, GDS are wildly out of their depth and ultra vires. They need to talk to a lot more people about it than just themselves.


Updated 3.5.16

A new metric has been added to the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard:

9. Certified company choice
It's 81%.

GDS continue to recommend against registering with Barclays, GB Group/CitizenSafe, the Royal Mail, Safran Morpho/SecureIdentity and Verizon.

User satisfaction, please see 7. above, remains a thing of the past. It is measured in three ways and none of the figures have been updated since 27 March 2016.


Updated 11.11.16

GDS don't always talk to themselves about the performance of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Two days ago they sent Chris Skidmore MP off to talk to Korea about it. In his speech, he said:

GOV.UK Verify [RIP] allows the citizen to create a single online identity to access a growing number of government services. And since going live in May, GOV.UK Verify [RIP] has verified more than 900,000 users.

Take a quick peak peek at the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard on the GOV.UK performance platform. On 1 May 2016 there were 692,951 GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts. By 6 November 2016, that figure had grown to 911,096.

Mr Skidmore is a historian as well as a politician. He knows to check his sources. But on this occasion he didn't. Since going live in May, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has verified 218,145 users and not "more than 900,000" of them.

Even its supporters warn about the "wildly unrealistic expectations" of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Next time he delivers a speech prepared for him by GDS he is advised to check it first.

RIP IDA – are GDS talking to themselves?

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but,

just in case it isn't obvious to all,

IDA is dead.

IDA, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",

is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.

And it's dead.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

Every week, the Government Digital Service (GDS) publish statistics about GOV.UK Verify (RIP) on their performance platform. A degree of academic rigour is called for. Without that, GDS are just talking to themselves.

As we speak, some of these statistics are complete to the week 11-17 April 2016 while others include the week 18-24 April 2016. We ignore the latter in the paragraphs below.

Willing enthusiasm isn't enough

11:19 a.m., 8 October 2014, 18 months ago, someone saves a copy of the Transactions Explorer page of the Government Digital Service's performance platform:

Then someone updates HMRC digital team plights troth to wrong Liege and forgets about it ...

... until recently.

You will notice that GDS were trying to measure how digital central government is, department by department. The data they used is repeated below. You won't be surprised which department wins ...

Department	Digital take-up*	Total cost*	Data coverage*	Transactions per year
HM Revenue and Customs	91.90%	£528m	77.30%	1,233,662,926
Department for Transport	57.40%	£268m	73.60%	130,337,698
Home Office	4.83%	£1.43bn	76.20%	126,270,677
Department for Work and Pensions	17.20%	£3.77bn	95.80%	107,781,180
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills	82.40%	£242m	54%	40,513,661
Department of Health	40.80%	£308m	61.90%	33,647,220
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs	86.60%	£101m	76.20%	22,580,710
Ministry of Justice	21.40%	£5.02m	52.40%	8,508,685
Cabinet Office	100%	£32.1k	100%	4,870,984
Department of Energy and Climate Change				1,331,834
Foreign and Commonwealth Office				549,065
Department for Communities and Local Government				515,756
Ministry of Defence				477,707
Department for Education				245,144
Attorney General's Office				65,658
Department for Culture, Media and Sport				33,589
Department for International Development				21,001
* Figures are based on data for high-volume services only

... yes, the Cabinet Office, which includes GDS, has 100% digital take-up (whatever that means) and 100% data coverage (whatever that means) and it's the winner.

That was 18 months ago. The figures were questionable.

Now, if you look at the services data on the performance platform, you find that GDS have stopped trying to measure digital take-up and data coverage. They list 802 public services and they have data on 571 of them which, between them, notch up 2.38 billion transactions p.a.

Take a look at GDS's data and you see that the 802 public services are divided up, department by department, as follows:

Department	No. services
Department for Business, Innovation & Skills	177
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs	118
Department of Health	98
Department for Transport	77
Department of Energy & Climate Change	67
Department for Work and Pensions	48
Department for Culture, Media & Sport	43
Home Office	41
HM Revenue & Customs	34
Ministry of Justice	29
Foreign & Commonwealth Office	18
Department for Education	11
Cabinet Office	11
HM Treasury	10
Valuation Office Agency	9
Department for International Development	3
Department for Communities and Local Government	3
Ministry of Defence	2
Attorney General's Office	2
UK Export Finance	1

Does the Department for Communities and Local Government really offer only three services? And the Ministry of Defence just two?

Again, the figures seem questionable.

GDS keep promising us canonical registers. On which government policy can be based rationally. Their performance platform omits data on the Government Gateway. And it omits data on the Basic Payment Scheme for farmers. And it doesn't look as though GDS can even count public services.

The Office for National Statistics have got a lot of work to do to bring GDS up to speed on data science. Willing enthusiasm isn't enough.

How can GDS be ready to build Government as a Platform?

Tomorrow they're attending – or possibly even hosting – a seminar on blockchain, Blockchain: exploring uses in government. Are they ready for that?

Willing enthusiasm isn't enough

11:19 a.m., 8 October 2014, 18 months ago, someone saves a copy of the Transactions Explorer page of the Government Digital Service's performance platform:

Then someone updates HMRC digital team plights troth to wrong Liege and forgets about it ...

... until recently.

You will notice that GDS were trying to measure how digital central government is, department by department. The data they used is repeated below. You won't be surprised which department wins ...

Openness should include farmers

One of the standing jokes about the Government Digital Service's identity assurance scheme, GOV.UK Verify (RIP), is the list of public services using it:

How can DEFRA's Rural Payments service be connected by GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? DEFRA don't have a rural payments service, as we always point out, at least not a computerised one – the computerised system GDS tried to build collapsed and farmers are all applying for their money using pencil and paper now, as a result of GDS's failure. There's nothing for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to connect farmers to.

It's misleading to pretend that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) connects farmers and their agents to the Rural Payments Agency's Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) and, if you're in any doubt, just look at the BPS dashboard on GDS's performance platform:

Couldn't be much clearer than that, could it? Nothing's happened since June 2015.

Except that that's not right. Take a look at the Rural Payments Agency's 7 March 2016 blog post, Start your 2016 Basic Payment Scheme application now. It's all on-line.

Take a look at their website, Everything rural businesses need to know about the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) in 2016 - including how to claim BPS online using the Rural Payments service.

Check with the National Farmers Union. And with the Farmers Gazette, 22 March 2016, Thousands of farmers log on as 2016 BPS application window opens.

Watch the film:



Farmers and their agents have been able to claim on-line since 2 February 2016. History didn't stop in June 2015, pace GDS's performance platform.

We seem to have another butcher's thumb on the scales case here like the Government Gateway. Why is the performance platform incomplete? Why doesn't it include data on either the Government Gateway or the live rural payments system? Why are GDS ignoring BPS?

Openness should include farmers

One of the standing jokes about the Government Digital Service's identity assurance scheme, GOV.UK Verify (RIP), is the list of public services using it:

How can DEFRA's Rural Payments service be connected by GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? DEFRA don't have a rural payments service, as we always point out, at least not a computerised one – the computerised system GDS tried to build collapsed and farmers are all applying for their money using pencil and paper now, as a result of GDS's failure. There's nothing for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to connect farmers to.

The gateway to openness

"The annual end submission date for tax self assessment in January is one of the critical events in the year for the Government Gateway, HMRC and government IT systems as a whole". So said David Hargreaves on 25 February 2016 in Managing the self assessment tsunami:

This year was the largest yet. The Government Gateway processed over 2.9 million self assessment submissions in January. This was just part of almost 7.5 million transactions it handled over the whole month, and the 10 million online self assessments processed in 2015. The volumes topped 400,000 on Friday 29 January. That’s the equivalent of 8.5 submissions per second.

The Government Gateway is clearly quite a substantial cross-government platform. And these are notable transaction volumes.

And yet, if you try to find anything out about the Government Gateway on the Government Digital Service's performance platform, look what you get:

It looks to you as though there's no such thing as the Government Gateway.

The same happens if you search data.gov.uk. You get no data.

It's as though the Government Gateway doesn't exist. Despite the Government Gateway having received 12.9 million 2015-16 self-assessment tax returns. And who knows how many VAT returns. And PAYE/NI returns. And corporation tax returns. And at what cost.

Given that the UK aims to be the most "open" nation on earth when it comes to government data, this is a glaring omission:

• The open data enthusiasts claim that openness leads to innovation – the omission of Government Gateway data is stymying innovation.
• The data scientists argue that rational government policy depends on the availability of data – Government Gateway data is not available and therefore policy is likely to be irrational.

Why is data relating to the Government Gateway hidden?

There's no point guessing. There's good reason though to insist that the omission be corrected, quickly, for the general good.

The gateway to openness

"The annual end submission date for tax self assessment in January is one of the critical events in the year for the Government Gateway, HMRC and government IT systems as a whole". So said David Hargreaves on 25 February 2016 in Managing the self assessment tsunami:

This year was the largest yet. The Government Gateway processed over 2.9 million self assessment submissions in January. This was just part of almost 7.5 million transactions it handled over the whole month, and the 10 million online self assessments processed in 2015. The volumes topped 400,000 on Friday 29 January. That’s the equivalent of 8.5 submissions per second.

The Government Gateway is clearly quite a substantial cross-government platform. And these are notable transaction volumes.

And yet, if you try to find anything out about the Government Gateway on the Government Digital Service's performance platform, look what you get:

Insolvent solutions

11:19 a.m., 8 October 2014, 18 months ago, someone saves a copy of the Transactions Explorer page of the Government Digital Service's performance platform:

Then someone updates HMRC digital team plights troth to wrong Liege and forgets about it.

Were you by chance to view the page source for the Transactions Explorer, in an idle moment, you would see the following scripts:

<script id="ga-params" type="text/javascript">   var GOVUK = GOVUK || {};   GOVUK.Analytics = GOVUK.Analytics || {};   var _gaq = _gaq || [];   _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-26179049-1']);   if(document.domain=='www.gov.uk') {     _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.www.gov.uk']);   } else {     _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', document.domain]);   }   _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);     // track pixel density ratio   if (window.devicePixelRatio) {     _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 11, 'Pixel Ratio', String(window.devicePixelRatio), 2 ]);   } </script> ... <script type="text/javascript">   _gaq.push(['_gat._anonymizeIp']);   _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);   (function() {     var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;     ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';     var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);   })(); </script>

What's that all about?

That's how you get Google Analytics to compile performance statistics for you. A lot of those occurrences of "ga" indicate Google Analytics. Statistics are being compiled for GDS's www.GOV.UK domain, the property ID of which is UA-26179049-1.

You stick that script into all the web pages you want to monitor. And GDS did. Until 2 June 2015, when they upgraded from Google Analytics to Universal Analytics.

Universal Analytics is much better, Google tell us. In particular:

What data does the tracking snippet capture? When you add either of these tracking snippets to your website, you send a pageview for each page your users visit. Google Analytics processes this data and can infer a great deal of information including: The total time a user spends on your site. The time a user spends on each page and in what order those pages were visited. What internal links were clicked (based on the URL of the next pageview). In addition, the IP address, user agent string, and initial page inspection analytics.js does when creating a new tracker is used to determine things like the following: The geographic location of the user. What browser and operating system are being used. Screen size and whether Flash or Java is installed. The referring site.

Perfect for calculating your advertising revenue. Or maintaining the audit trail in a transactional system. Or providing circumstantial evidence to corroborate someone's alibi.

But GDS have spotted that people don't like being kept under surveillance. And so a month ago they told us that:

Analytics and performance To gather performance data for the [GOV.UK Verify (RIP)] service we create our own logging. During the early days of private beta, we started measuring performance using our own logging system, but we now make use of Piwik, an open source web analytics system, which we host ourselves. We chose this so that we could avoid sending data to third party web analytics companies.

That's GDS being sensitive to user preferences, isn't it.

No, it isn't. Piwik collects all the same surveillance data that Google's analytics products do. Maybe more. GDS still get that surveillance data. It's just that Google don't.

Don't they?

What is there to stop Google monitoring www.GOV.UK if they want to?

Nothing.

And not just Google.

What is promoted by GDS as the solution to a problem, isn't. It might look at first blush like a solution. But it's a solution that doesn't solve the problem. It's an "insolvent solution". It doesn't work.

Piwik isn't GDS's only insolvent solution. Their adoption of agile as the exclusive software engineering methodology is another. Ditto Government as a Platform. And the list goes on.

----------

Updated 21.4.16 1

The DMossEsq leader-writers expected a storm of protest over the post above. Hundreds of irate lexicographers complaining about the phrase "insolvent solution".

We had an answer prepared. Solutions have obligations. A solution that doesn't solve the problem it was designed for cannot discharge its liabilities. Which is pretty well the definition of insolvency.

But nobody complained.

Not about that.

What did exercise hundreds of distraught callers to DMossEsq's Pyongyang call centre was GDS's blog post earlier this month, Capturing comprehensive analytics across GOV.UK:

To help us analyse and measure the performance of our content we use Google Analytics, which records the pages users visit.

Are GDS using Piwik, please see above, or are they using Google Analytics? Which is it?

The answer seems to be Piwik for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) and otherwise Google Analytics.

One way and another, don't worry – you are being properly surveilled (surveyed?) by GDS and Google.

Or actually, perhaps you should worry just a little bit. This afternoon GDS published Rebuilding GOV.UK’s publishing platform - an update.

Under the heading Why this work is such a high priority you might expect to see reasons like "to help spend the £450 million the Chancellor unexpectedly gave us" or "one of the joys of agile software engineering is that the job is never done". But, no, GDS give seven other reasons for GOV.UK being an insolvent solution, including this:

5. Querying analytics across GOV.UK At the moment we can’t follow user journeys across different types of content because of the different applications involved. This change [the re-building of GOV.UK] will mean we’ll have a much better understanding of user journeys, and the improvements we need to make.

It seems that GDS have inadvertently created 141 silos within GOV.UK. Silos that can't communicate with each other. And can't be monitored easily from the performance platform dashboard bunker under Holborn Towers. This situation is demonstrably insufferable:

It may well be that not a single human being has ever complained about this matter in any of GDS's user experience laboratories/interrogation centres. But it's affecting "GDS efficiency". And that means it's a user need.

"We expect this work will continue to dominate our roadmap for much of the 2016 to 2017 financial year", say GDS. What will they find to dominate their roadmap in 2017-18?

Updated 21.4.16 2

Literally years before yesterday, the UK Home Office tried to introduce government-issued ID cards. The project failed spectacularly.

But Whitehall didn't give up. The National Identity Scheme (NIS) was promptly replaced with the Identity Assurance Programme (IDAP), which incorporates GOV.UK Verify (RIP), and work continued.

The problem diagnosed with the NIS was the NIR, the National Identity Register. Get rid of the NIR, and then surely Whitehall's will would prevail.

GOV.UK Verify (RIP) would succeed where the NIS had failed, as long as there was no NIR. That's why the IDAP people came up with the notion of "identity providers", now known less sinisterly as "certified companies".

Plough your way through the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) registration process, and after a while you get to a screen something like this:

You may see different "identity providers" when you try to register. GDS are forever changing their recommended list.

Click on that Why there's a choice of companies link, and this is what you see:

Why there’s a choice of companies More certified companies means a more secure system – information is not stored in one place, but is split up in lots of different places, making it safer. It’s your right to choose who you want to deal with from these companies. It’s also your right to change which company you deal with at any time. When verifying your identity, these companies can use their own records, and they’re certified to access information like credit records. They do this to check information you provide from passports and driving licences is correct. Certified companies meet strict government privacy standards, so you can trust them with your information. They won’t use your information for any other purpose without your consent. There’s no effect on your credit score. Choose a company

"More certified companies means a more secure system" – no it doesn't.

"... information is not stored in one place, but is split up in lots of different places, making it safer" – or less safe.

Registering with a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) "identity provider" requires you to hand over the most minute details of your passport and driving licence to total strangers. When you look into the matter, you find that your personal information is stored all over the world, beyond any possibility of your control or even the UK government's.

GDS were told to do identity assurance with no NIR. They've ended up with eight of them, one per "identity provider".

In what way is GOV.UK Verify (RIP) the solution to the NIR problem? None. It's an insolvent solution.

Insolvent solutions

11:19 a.m., 8 October 2014, 18 months ago, someone saves a copy of the Transactions Explorer page of the Government Digital Service's performance platform:

Then someone updates HMRC digital team plights troth to wrong Liege and forgets about it.

RIP IDA – it tolls for thee

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but,

just in case it isn't obvious to all,

IDA is dead.

IDA, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",

is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.

And it's dead.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

"Hi, Richard James here to give you an update on the Personal Tax Account".

Couldn't be more jovial, could it. That's the opening line in a charming little blog post published by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) the other day, One million customers using the Personal Tax Account.

They're very proud of their new personal tax account. "34 different actions ... That’s how many things you can already do in the Personal Tax Account that would have previously meant a letter or phone to call to us".

One million customers? Everything HMRC does is in the millions. Apart from the things they do by the billion. One million HMRC customers for anything isn't news. It's reassuringly dull. Like the worthy little video they've released, reminiscent of the old Central Office of Information blockbusters on food hygiene or road safety.

But part way through this little gem of a post, what's this we read? "Have you tried it yet? ... From the Personal Tax Account sign in page you can now log in by setting up a Government Gateway account".

A Government Gateway account? Surely they mean a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account?

No. HMRC mean what they say. A Government Gateway account. They're promoting the Government Gateway and not the Government Digital Service's GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

If you follow the Personal Tax Account link above, you'll find that HMRC do mention GOV.UK Verify (RIP) but only to warn you that if you use that to log in, then there is only a restricted service available. "You can also sign in using GOV.UK Verify [RIP], but you won’t be able to use some services":

The Government Gateway has worked for 15 years, allowing us to transact with scores of public services. By now it must have been instrumental in raising trillions of pounds of revenue.

Exactly how much revenue? How many transactions has it undertaken? How much does it cost? How many Government Gateway accounts are there? We don't know.

Mysteriously, there is no Government Gateway dashboard on GDS's performance platform. There should be.

A Government Gateway dashboard would reveal its colossal significance. And the ignorant vandalism of pretending that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) can replace it.

"We’ve come a long way since we publicly launched the account in December 2015". Yes. After two years of beta operation, GDS's GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has 487,000 verified accounts, less than half what HMRC's Personal Tax Account has achieved in four months. And GOV.UK Verify (RIP) can connect you to just nine public services according to GDS (including the rural payments service, which doesn't exist), while HMRC's Personal Tax Account already has 34 options.

GDS aim to change the declared status of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) from beta to live some time this month, April 2016. They've got 12 days left.

They can call it what they like but if it's live, it's live without HMRC. Which means it's dead. Because, as we always say, "on-line access to public services in the UK" means on-line access to HMRC.

CitizenSafe, also known as "GB Group plc", are one of GDS's "identity providers" for GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Making this announcement would properly fall to a minister, not a contractor. GDS recommend that five of their remaining "identity providers", including CitizenSafe, are unlikely to be able to verify your identity.

In the lethal custody of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Government Gateway has been neglected for years. Now someone seems to have paid it a bit of attention. An innovation, it sent DMossEsq's mobile phone a one-time password when he logged in to take a look at his personal tax account.

We have suggested recently that the Government Gateway should be taken away from DWP and given to HMRC. Perhaps it has been.

Like any system, the Government Gateway needs maintenance. Unlike the Government Gateway, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) can't handle companies and partnerships and trusts. Only individuals. If the Government Gateway dies of neglect, the UK won't have any tax revenue.

To do his identity-proofing, DMossEsq had to enter a bit of P60 information or payslip information or passport information. (Your P60 shows the tax you’ve paid on your salary in the tax year.) He chose the P60 option and that felt appropriate. That was the user experience.

By contrast, the user experience of handing over detailed passport, driving licence and credit history information to register for GOV.UK Verify (RIP), handing it over to a bunch of strangers, who share it with organisations all over the world, out of your control, feels entirely inappropriate.

That blog post of HMRC's. It wasn't just a chirpy piece of public information. It was also a death knell.

... never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

----------

Updated 8.8.16

The chirpy Mr James has published another blog post about HMRC personal tax accounts.

He's got a lot to be chirpy about.

Last time we heard from him, in April 2016, there were one million active users, please see above. Now, four months later, there are 3½ million.

While HMRC have attracted 2½ million new users, the Government Digital Service (GDS) have added just 117,000 new GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts taking their total to about 796,000 on 31 July 2016.

Clearly most people are not using GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to access their personal tax accounts. They're using the Government Gateway. That's the identity assurance scheme that allows you as noted above to access public services without spraying your personal information all over the world.

At the moment, if you need to help your 94 year-old mother-in-law to access her personal tax account, you have to identify yourself to the Trusted Helper service via GOV.UK Verify (RIP). In future, Mr James tells us, it will be possible to use the Government Gateway instead.

GOV.UK Verify (RIP) may have been declared "live" in May 2016. But what people are using in their millions is the Government Gateway.


Updated 10.8.16

In the four months it has taken HMRC to add 2,500,000 users of one of its services, Personal Tax Accounts, please see above, GDS have added just 117,000 new GOV.UK Verify (RIP) victims. The DMossEsq slide rule suggests that HMRC are outperforming GDS by about 21:1.

GDS are onto the problem.

Yesterday they published GOV.UK Verify [RIP]: Technical delivery update, 9 August 2016.

They intend to increase adoption of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) by improving not only "the layout and messaging on the page displayed to users after a certified company successfully verifies their identity so it is clear how they can continue to the government service they intended to use" but also "our handling of the user’s choice of language (English or Welsh) so we can show the correct language version of each screen throughout the entire process, from selecting a government service through the GOV.UK Verify hub to certified companies".

Moreover, to improve the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) "completion rate", GDS have already "started work on an A/B testing framework which will allow us to determine whether one version of a screen or one wording of a sentence is clearer to users than another". And soon, GDS expect to "run A/B tests on the GOV.UK Verify [RIP] hub to explore the effect of company logos on the initial information pages".

Plucky stuff from GDS and their shrinking band of "identity providers" but, barring a miracle, the gold medal (medal aur) still looks pretty safely in the bag for HMRC and the Government Gateway.


Updated 26.9.16 1
Seven weeks ago there were 3½ million users of HMRC's on-line personal tax account service. Now there are five million, HMRC digital marks major milestone: "The five millionth customer has signed up to the Personal Tax Account, marking a major milestone in the ongoing development of HMRC’s digital services".

There were only 0.847 million GOV.UK Verify (RIP accounts as at 18 September 2016. Of those, 0.185 million were "basic" accounts, unverified accounts, useless to HMRC. Of the remaining 0.662 million accounts, we don't know if that's 0.662 million people or 0.083 million people who each have eight GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts, one with each of the eight "identity providers" who have registered people over the past few years.

Anything between 83,000 and 662,000 of HMRC's on-line personal tax accounts could be registered through GOV.UK Verify (RIP). So anything between 4,338,000 and 5,000,000 must be registered through the only alternative, the Government Gateway. And they're signing up fast. 1½ million in seven weeks.

When it comes to the high volume take-up of a serious on-line service, people choose the Government Gateway over GOV.UK Verify. RIP.


Updated 26.9.16 2
As an experiment, would you please click on Personal tax account: sign in or set up. Anyone can. No harm will come of it.

If you have a Government Gateway account and you log in to your personal tax account, you should see something like this:

It is also possible to log in with a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account. When he does so, this is what DMossEsq sees ...

... no self-assessment option.

HMRC did warn people about this omission, please see above: "You can also sign in using GOV.UK Verify [RIP], but you won’t be able to use some services".

Oddly, that warning has now been removed. Disappointed self-assessors now have to find out the hard way that there's no point using GOV.UK Verify (RIP).


Updated 21.10.16

Less than a month ago, 26 September 2016, we reported that there were five million users of HMRC's new on-line personal tax account service. Now there are six million:

Team win project of the year award ... Last night our Personal Tax Account (PTA) project team won Project of the Year at the Dynamites 16 awards which recognise and showcase the IT and Technology industry in the North East ... The team have worked incredibly hard and achieved so much in a short space of time. It's not even a year since we launched the PTA and we’ve already had over 6 million customers log in and use their account ...

Dynamite, indeed:

• While PTA has added yet another million users, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has signed up just over 19,000 new users. At least 981,000 new PTA users must be using the Government Gateway to access the service.
• And while HMRC have produced PTA, among other things, what have GDS achieved?

Yesterday, GDS director general Kevin Cunnington "outlined that GOV.UK Verify [RIP] remains a key element of GDS’s ambitions".

Why?

What's the point?

Elementary data science – you know, policy based on evidence, that sort of thing – surely indicates that all identity assurance resources should go into improving the Government Gateway.


Updated 17.11.16

HMRC's Mr James is even more jovial than usual – "last night the Personal Tax Account (PTA) won Digital Project of the Year at the annual UK IT Industry Awards".

PTA is now up to 6.7 million users in less than a year. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has been creating accounts for just over two years since 13 October 2014 and now has 0.9 million of them.

DMossEsq has created seven GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts for himself. If other people have done the same – seven accounts each – GOV.UK Verify (RIP) may have just 0.13 million users compared with PTA's 6.7 million.

Given that the vast majority of those 6.7 million people aren't logging on to PTA through GOV.UK Verify (RIP), they must be using the Government Gateway instead. That's certainly Mr James's advice. He's in no doubt. He says:

To access your account go to the Personal Tax Account sign-in page and login by setting up a Government Gateway account. It only takes a few minutes and you’ll need to have your National Insurance number and your P60 handy. If you already have a Government Gateway account it will be quicker still. To make the process even more secure we’ll text you a security code that you’ll need to enter each time you use your account.

As far as HMRC are concerned, GOV.UK Verify? RIP.


Updated 22.11.16

In his latest blog post, Personal Tax Account - an award-winning service, Mr James mentions that "since we last spoke we’ve introduced two new online payment services available via [HMRC's on-line personal tax account service(PTA)]". One is for under-payment of tax, the other for over-payment.

Where taxpayers have over-paid, they can apply for a refund through PTA and the money should turn up in their bank account in five days or less. Mr James says "we’ve received just over 1.5 million repayments claims so far with an average claim of £519. The total amount we’ve refunded is nearly £780 million".

Does that ring a bell?

It should.

At least it should if you've read GDS aiming for 25 million users of Gov.uk Verify [RIP] by 2020 in Computer Weekly magazine.

"For GDS to achieve the 25 million user target would require several high-volume services to adopt Verify, such as HM Revenue & Customs’ (HMRC’s) self-assessment and digital tax services, the Universal Credit welfare system, and the NHS".

What are the chances of that?

Not good: "HMRC has been pressing ahead with its own identity verification service, based on the existing Government Gateway – a 15-year-old system that is used for individuals and businesses to submit their tax returns".

Kevin Cunnington, director general of the Government Digital Service (GDS), has an award-winning answer: "HMRC has been reluctant to fully adopt Verify because the department requires a lower level of assurance than Verify currently offers".

Are we to infer that HMRC would use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to authorise £780 million of payments if only the wretched system wasn't just so good? HMRC prefer to be unsure who they're giving our money to?

HMRC's advice to taxpayers is: "to access your account go to the Personal Tax Account sign-in page and login by setting up a Government Gateway account" (please see above). Are they ignoring GOV.UK Verify (RIP) because they want to make fraudulent payments?

It seems unlikely.

Remember that, according to the US National Institute for Standards and Technology, the level of identity assurance offered by GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is no better than self-certification.

Remember that, according to GDS, only about 70% of people can create a GOV.K Verify (RIP) account. What would HMRC do with the other 30% of taxpayers who are owed a refund?

Remember that, according to GDS, if you create a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account, your personal data wings its way all over the world into the databases of any number of companies you've never heard of. That doesn't happen with the Government Gateway.

That noise you heard in Computer Weekly magazine? That was Mr Cunnington whistling to keep his spirits up.

And the other noise? The bell you heard? It's tolling for GOV.UK Verify. RIP.


Updated 22.2.17

18 April 2016, please see above, there we were, full of questions:

The Government Gateway has worked for 15 years, allowing us to transact with scores of public services. By now it must have been instrumental in raising trillions of pounds of revenue. Exactly how much revenue? How many transactions has it undertaken? How much does it cost? How many Government Gateway accounts are there? We don't know. Mysteriously, there is no Government Gateway dashboard on GDS's performance platform. There should be.

No answers, of course, ...

... until 13 February 2017, when Mike Howes-Roberts told us that the Government Gateway supports "123 live digital services across government ... 406 million authentications a year ... more than 50 million active accounts", please see Green light for Government Gateway transformation.

As recommended by DMossEsq, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have taken over responsibility for the Gateway from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), who starved it of attention, and are now working on a new version.

Why?

They have to.

There's no alternative. Without the Gateway HMRC couldn't raise the £716 billion that we need to fund public services this year (p.6).

It's not as though HMRC can rely on the Government Digital Service's GOV.UK Verify (RIP). After five years of development, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) can't even verify the identity of a company. Since 13 October 2014 only about 1 million GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts have been created and they've only been used about 1½ million times.

Not surprisingly, Mr Howes-Roberts says in his blog post: "HMRC is developing its own identity system for individuals, businesses and agents. Other departments will use Gov.uk Verify [RIP] for all individual citizen services".

At least, that's what he did say. But now someone has leaned on HMRC and those words have been removed from his blog post, redacted, censored, suppressed, ...

You don't believe it?

But it's true, please see HMRC rejects Gov.uk Verify [RIP] in Computer Weekly magazine:

"Update: Since the publication of this article, HMRC has edited its blog post and removed the above statement. Computer Weekly has asked HMRC why it decided to remove it".

Clearly an operation has been mounted to try to save GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

It's not just blog posts being altered Minitrue-style.

Stephen Foreshew-Cain, one of GDS's two ex-executive directors, suggested on Twitter that HMRC shouldn't develop a successor to the Government Gateway. But they have to. Please see above. No revenue, no public services.

It's not easy getting a cover-up right.

Not for Mr Foreshew-Cain ...

... and not for John Manzoni, chief executive of the UK Civil Service, who tried in a speech yesterday to promote the dying system: "Verify - the government identity service for citizens - is enabling people to access a whole range of online government services easily, securely and in a way which builds their trust". Alternative facts, anyone?

It's hard to achieve coherent falsification of the facts. In the same speech, Mr Manzoni also said: "Personal tax accounts from HMRC now take a real-time digital approach. For the first time you can log in when you like, check your tax information and manage your details online in one place. More than 8 million citizens have now signed up ...".

8 million+? We know that there were 6.7 million personal tax accounts in November 2016. So, over 1.3 million accounts have been added in three months. In the same period, 189,734 accounts have been added to GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Even if they were all used for HMRC's on-line personal tax account service, the 1.3 million+ total would mean that they were still outnumbered 6:1.

What Mr Manzoni has unwittingly demonstrated is that, given the choice, most people avoid GOV.UK Verify (RIP) and opt for the only alternative, the Government Gateway.


Updated 24.2.17

The Government Digital Service (GDS) want to recruit a lead service designer to work on the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) team. £60,000 p.a., two-year contract, flexitime, ... not bad, worth considering:

Applicants are told in the job advertisement that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) uses "a range of certified companies". Follow that link, and applicants will discover that "certified companies have to be ... certified by an independent body (such as tScheme) to confirm that they meet government standards for identity assurance". Follow the tScheme link and applicants will discover that three of GDS's seven so-called "certified companies" aren't certified. So much for government standards, what are applicants expected to make of that?

Applicants are told further that "[the] GOV.UK Verify [RIP] Privacy team aspires to build trust with the users and stakeholders with [a] privacy by design approach ... You can read more about our privacy principles in our blog". What will happen to the applicants' trust when they discover that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) fails to comply with a single one of its own privacy principles. GDS's aspiration has failed. Bang goes trust.

It's not just lead service designers. Privacy analysts, too: "We are seeking a pragmatic and solutions oriented privacy professional to reinforce the GOV.UK Verify [RIP] Privacy team". Even the poor privacy analysts (£30,722 - £34,200) GDS is trying to recruit are being given the same misinformation, "[the] GOV.UK Verify [RIP] Privacy team aspires to build trust with the users and stakeholders with [a] privacy by design approach ...".

It looks prima facie as though recruits are being deceived.

RIP IDA – it tolls for thee

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but,

just in case it isn't obvious to all,

IDA is dead.

IDA, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",

is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.

And it's dead.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

"Hi, Richard James here to give you an update on the Personal Tax Account".

Couldn't be more jovial, could it. That's the opening line in a charming little blog post published by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) the other day, One million customers using the Personal Tax Account.

They're very proud of their new personal tax account. "34 different actions ... That’s how many things you can already do in the Personal Tax Account that would have previously meant a letter or phone to call to us".

One million customers? Everything HMRC does is in the millions. Apart from the things they do by the billion. One million HMRC customers for anything isn't news. It's reassuringly dull. Like the worthy little video they've released, reminiscent of the old Central Office of Information blockbusters on food hygiene or road safety.

But part way through this little gem of a post, what's this we read? "Have you tried it yet? ... From the Personal Tax Account sign in page you can now log in by setting up a Government Gateway account".

That shouldn't be there, should it?

Remember dear old GOV.UK? The award-winning public face of the UK administration on-line? Here's what it looks like today:

Spot anything?

They've stopped claiming falsely that GOV.UK replaces Directgov and Business Link?

Yes. Anything else?

They're still claiming falsely that you can use GOV.UK to register to vote?

Yes. Anything else?

They're suggesting falsely that Universal Jobmatch is a GOV.UK service when in fact it's still on Directgov?

Yes. Anything else?

No.

What about that quite large reference to the EU referendum which occupies a not inconsiderable amount of the prime acreage on the screen? And the link to Find out why the Government believes we should remain.

Oh yes. Bit odd. That shouldn't be there, should it?

That shouldn't be there, should it?

Remember dear old GOV.UK? The award-winning public face of the UK administration on-line? Here's what it looks like today:

Spot anything?

They've stopped claiming falsely that GOV.UK replaces Directgov and Business Link?

Yes. Anything else?

They're still claiming falsely that you can use GOV.UK to register to vote?

Yes. Anything else?

They're suggesting falsely that Universal Jobmatch is a GOV.UK service when in fact it's still on Directgov?

Yes. Anything else?

No.

What about that quite large reference to the EU referendum which occupies a not inconsiderable amount of the prime acreage on the screen? And the link to Find out why the Government believes we should remain.

Oh yes. Bit odd. That shouldn't be there, should it?

"Where we’re at, and where we’re going"

You never know where you are with the Government Digital Service (GDS). Except you do.

-----  o  O  o  -----

Stephen Foreshew-Cain, their executive director, published a blog post the other day vaguely on the subject of GDS's mysterious strategy.

GDS's job is to transform government. Digitally. And how are they going to do that? By "working together" with other government departments, "doing things [?] with departments, and helping departments to do things [?] with one another".

Mr Foreshew-Cain's predecessor, Mike Bracken, had a similarly dismissive opinion of his benighted colleagues in Whitehall: "traditional policy-making is largely broken"

It's all about harmony and collaboration, you'd think ...

... but Mr Foreshew-Cain promptly accuses these other government departments of "decades of inaction and inertia". Have you ever tried inspiring harmony in someone by calling them "inert"?

It's not obvious that Mr Foreshew-Cain has grasped some of the more recondite elements of this collaboration lark.

-----  o  O  o  -----

But at least he's clear that the job Whitehall must collaborate on is digital transformation. Except that he also says, in bold: "It’s not about computers ... The important thing that's changing here isn't the IT, it's the people. It's us".

Mr Foreshew-Cain's predecessor, Mike Bracken, had a similarly ambiguous relationship with digital-by-default"

The old GDS strategy was called "digital by default". Have they acknowledged failure and given that up now? "It's not about computers" ... Are they changing their name to "GPS", the Government People Service?

-----  o  O  o  -----

"We're where the buck stops", he says, referring to GDS. Which may be news to several other government departments, currently labouring under the delusion that they, too, exercise a certain amount of responsibility.

Mr Foreshew-Cain's predecessor, Mike Bracken, also thought that GDS is the government.

While claiming that the government transformation buck stops with GDS, Mr Foreshew-Cain modestly acknowledges at the same time that GDS knows nothing about government. It's the other departments and their suppliers who "understand their users and services better than we ever will ... They know the policy, the intent of that policy, and the legislation that sits behind it ... They know their users better than anyone. They are by far the best people to meet those user needs".

-----  o  O  o  -----

He says "it’s a mutually beneficial, two-way relationship" but there's no telling what GDS brings to the inert party. "We've got your back", apparently. What if anything does that mean?

Before you try to answer that, be aware that, having said it, Mr Foreshew-Cain "realised afterwards that the reverse is true: everyone else, all the departments and suppliers we deal with every day -- they've got our back too".

-----  o  O  o  -----

"The unit of delivery is the team", as GDS have said for years and as Mr Foreshew-Cain repeats, unnecessarily, you might imagine, because it still makes no sense. But don't get the wrong impression.

Like his predecessor, Mike Bracken, thank goodness that Mr Foreshew-Cain is firing blanks.

You may entertain the notion that by "team" is meant some small sub-set of dedicated Whitehall people, expert in delivery. Not a bit of it – "the team I'm talking about here isn't GDS, it's all of government. It's the suppliers we deal with too. Transforming government, together". Everyone's got everyone else's backs and there's no telling who will be holding the buck when the music stops.

-----  o  O  o  -----

An inveterate crowd-pleaser, Mr Foreshew-Cain tickles everyone's tummy with "digital" and "transformation" and "delivery" and "learning" and "putting the users first" and "agile" and "iterated" and "silo" and "ecosystem" and "registers" and "platform" ... but what does it amount to? How are GDS going to transform the relationship between people and the state? And when? And why?

Like his predecessor, Mike Bracken, and other senior members of GDS, Mr Foreshew-Cain should beware jibba jabba. There are limits.

He has the answer. GDS's one and only register. The register of countries. With 199 records on it. And 204 entries (?).

"To the casual observer, it doesn't look like much", he admits, "but it's a big deal". Is it? How big?

-----  o  O  o  -----

Unlike Mr Foreshew-Cain, his predecessor, Mike Bracken, thought that strategy is a waste of time.

It is thought that GDS's new advisory board has its first meeting the day after tomorrow on Monday 11 April 2016. If they're meeting for anything more than the free sandwiches their first demand may be for a new GDS. Given "where we're at", that could be "where we're going".

----------

Updated 12.5.16

Mr Foreshew-Cain promised to tell us Where we’re at, and where we’re going and, after reading the post above, you may be forgiven for still not knowing where the Government Digital Service (GDS) is going.

Hardly suprising, as Mr Foreshew-Cain told us himself yesterday in What government might look like in 2030:

I don’t claim any special ability to see the future, and I think predicting specific technological advances is probably a fool’s errand ...

Nevertheless, he's made another brave attempt at foreshewing the future. He says both ...

... when I think about government in 2030, I don’t think about what it will passively become, but what we will actively make it.

... and:

... the biggest problem we face is re-shaping ourselves so that we’re better placed to change as rapidly as the world around us.

Which is it? Is he proposing to actively make the future? Or is he more inclined to be event-driven?

He doesn't answer those questions but of one thing he is sure. By 2030:

The way that the law is made will have changed. Today we are often blocked by the stuff written on the faces of bills about which we have limited understanding of feasibility, but by 2030 we will have legislation that supports service delivery, not blocks it. White papers & green papers would be replaced by public prototypes of new or iterated services ...

Parliamentary government will be a thing of the past. No more silly old bills, white papers or green papers.

Government is all about power. And if Parliament doesn't have that power, someone else must. Who?

Mr Foreshew-Cain thinks power will reside in the data:

Data-driven government In 15 years from now, the work we’ve already begun in the government data programme will be having far-reaching effects. Better use of government data will change the world for business, for government itself, and for citizens ... We will have transformed the relationship between citizen and state ...

In that case, anyone who can change the data can influence policy. Power will move away from Parliament and citizens will have a new relationship with whoever can access GDS's registers, their "single source of truth" in the cloud.

If we get all this right, public services will be so easy to build, they could become almost disposable. Imagine being able to create a new service in hours, not months. Imagine being able to create two slightly different versions of a service, and see which one works best. And then, having done the research and iterated and improved the better one, simply killing off the one that didn’t make the cut. Imagine being able to do that at negligible cost.

You can imagine all you like but on the evidence so far GDS take not hours but years to create new services like basic payments for farmers and identity assurance for us Brits and even then they don't work.

You may agree with Mr Foreshew-Cain that that will all change in the future:

... we’re building, or helping departments to build, new common components that make services easier to assemble - a shared digital infrastructure ...

We were made exactly the same promise by the object-oriented prophets in the late 1980s if not earlier and it didn't happen – according to Mr Foreshew-Cain, the work is still outstanding.

You have to have a good reason to believe that services-assembled-from-components will happen this time. Do you?

GDS won't have changed. Mr Foreshew-Cain promises us that:

In 2030, and in the years that follow, we shall still be iterating. We shall still be doing the user research, doing the hard work to make things simple. There’s no definition of done. We’re never done ...

-----  o  O  o  -----

We have been quoting from Mr Foreshew-Cain's speech delivered to TechUK’s Public Sector 2030 event the day before yesterday.

The funny thing is that he was so busy telling the congregation that we will all be governed by the cloud service providers in 2030 – Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple – that he forgot to tell them what's happening this month, May 2016.

For that, you need to read an article in UKAuthority.com, Verify to go live by end of month.

The GOV.UK Verify [RIP] identity assurance service will hopefully go live by the end of this month, according to the head of the Government Digital Service. Stephen Foreshew-Cain told UKAuthority at the techUKPS2030 conference that the platform is currently in its live beta phase and undergoing a service assessment. He said he expects it to move into live in the next couple of weeks.

It didn't happen last month when it was meant to. Is GOV.UK Verify (RIP) "on track" to go live this month?

Predicting specific technological advances is probably a fool’s errand ...

-----  o  O  o  -----

But GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has not escaped everyone's attention. Certainly not the cloud service providers' attention. At yesterday's session of the European Identity & Cloud Conference 2016, guess who won an award:

The European Identity & Cloud Award for the category Best Innovation in eGovernment / eCitizen went to UK Government Digital Services (GDS) which has added a new verification service called GOV.UK Verify [RIP]. This service is a simple [says who?] way for UK citizens to access an increasing [says who?] range of UK government services online. UK GDS is awarded for its continued [if unavailing] efforts for enabling citizen IDs for access [which we already have via the Government Gateway] to a variety of services.

Updated 18 October 2016

The Digital Economy Bill is currently at the Committee stage. There was a consultation. There have been debates in the House of Commons. Written evidence has been submitted by interested parties and is being considered by the 19-member Committee (p.2). Anyone can submit written evidence to the Committee until 27 October 2016. The Committee is hearing oral testimony in 12 evidence sessions, televised and open to the public. If the Bill survives this stage, there are seven more stages to get through before, in more or less amended form, it is enacted by royal assent.

No doubt this time-consuming and detailed scrutiny procedure majoring on public exposure can be improved but this is the painstaking state of the art of producing legislation successfully after several hundred years of democracy here in the UK.

It gets results. The drafting of the Digital Economy Bill, particularly Part 5 (p.28ff), has been quickly and publicly unmasked as deficient, slapdash and slovenly and will need to be heavily amended.

Compare that success with the alternative proposed by Stephen Foreshew-Cain, chief executive of the Government Digital Service (GDS) at the time, May 2016, in What government might look like in 2030:

By 2030 policy making will be minimally designed and built as a framework which allows flexibility and feedback, not as a fait accompli. The way that the law is made will have changed. Today we are often blocked by the stuff written on the faces of bills about which we have limited understanding of feasibility, but by 2030 we will have legislation that supports service delivery, not blocks it. White papers & green papers would be replaced by public prototypes of new or iterated services.

No hint of public scrutiny, it's no democratic alternative at all. What are or were – Mr Foreshew-Cain is gone now – GDS talking about?


Updated 8.12.16 1

Today is the fourth and last day of the Supreme Court's monumental Brexit Referendum hearing. Can the Judiciary make law? Can they instruct the Executive? Can the Executive act without the authorisation of the Legislature? Is the Separation of Powers breaking down? Can the Legislature park its supremacy and allow itself to be instructed by a Plebiscite? Who is supreme? How supreme? What about the European Court of Justice? And what about that EU court's fight for power against the Council of Europe's Court of Human Rights?

While our understanding of parliamentary supremacy is being re-discovered in Westminster, or even re-made, don't forget that 1½ miles to the north in Holborn there is a small band of user experience merchants whose last executive director believes that by 2030 it's UX people who will be making the law, and not MPs or the government or judges:

By 2030 policy making will be minimally designed and built as a framework which allows flexibility and feedback, not as a fait accompli. The way that the law is made will have changed. Today we are often blocked by the stuff written on the faces of bills about which we have limited understanding of feasibility, but by 2030 we will have legislation that supports service delivery, not blocks it. White papers & green papers would be replaced by public prototypes of new or iterated services.

Updated 8.12.16 2

Under Mike Bracken, GDS had a combative relationship with many of the departments of state. "Traditional policy-making is largely broken", he told Whitehall, please see above.

His successor, Stephen Foreshew-Cain, was similar in that he, too, like Mr Bracken, had no experience of government. He called for a more collaborative approach with the rest of Whitehall but spoilt it with references to "decades of inaction and inertia".

With Foreshew-Cain now also gone, will the relationship improve under ex-Goldman Sachs man Kevin Cunnington?

The omens are not good.

GDS celebrates its fifth birthday today. Earlier, they published a draft history of the organisation, including unremitting praise for the success of the award-winning GOV.UK, the face of the UK government on-line.

And yet, if you read the Inside GOV.UK blog posts about their content operating model, you hear a different story.

Trisha Doyle, explains that there are about 3,000 pages of GOV.UK that are maintained by her team. Those pages are exemplary, unlike the 300,000 or more other pages maintained by editors in the departments. They're rubbish. "Low quality", as she calls them. Out of date, too many PDFs, badly catalogued, ... "Users' time is being wasted".

It would be premature to declare an armistice.


Updated 1.3.17

GOV.UK is the Government Digital Service's award-winning face of the UK government on-line. It has been since October 2012. Have GDS rested on their laurels since then? Not a bit of it. Only the other day, there they were telling us How we’re making GOV.UK work harder for users.

"GOV.UK is the government’s most mature digital product", they say. That can't be true, can it. Given that the government started digitising during the Second World War. While GDS concentrate on the front end only, public administration still relies on back-end legacy applications developed decades ago.

Also, "we’ve been the central publishing platform for all of government for nearly 4 years". That's not true either. Universal Jobmatch, the most popular government website, is still on Directgov (for jobseekers) and BusinessLink (for employers). Try submitting your brand new confirmation statement – what used to be an annual return – to Companies House and you won't find yourself on GOV.UK either. No, you'll be on ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk.

A month ago (8.12.16 2), GDS gave it as their firm opinion that although the 3,000 GOV.UK pages for which they are responsible are exemplary, the other 300,000 are low quality, they include too many PDFs, they're badly catalogued and their users' time is being wasted. The other departments of state are clearly rubbish at editing GOV.UK content.

They need GDS to help them, poor lambs, and with all their wealth of experience that's just what GDS are going to do: "we’ll be working with departments to help them understand how their content is used and understood by citizens".

GDS are going to provide "a supported API [applications programme interface] for content so that anyone can take a reliable feed of our content". Reliable? Says who?

GDS will "be working on site search ... This is a fundamental issue that we can’t leave any longer". Maybe. But why have they left it this long?

"We want to continue successfully working in an agile way". That didn't help at DEFRA, did it. It hasn't stopped GOV.UK Verify (RIP) being years late. GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify are still nowhere near going live. The other departments are developing their own alternatives in the absence of GDS services. Perhaps, like the Americans, GDS should get out of their rut and consider moving on from agile.

"We want to help transform the relationship between citizen and state ... GOV.UK ... is where this ‘relationship’ actually happens". Try telling that to a physiotherapist trying to get a 94 year-old to do her exercises.

Another day, another set of GDS's alternative facts. That's what it looks like ...

... but not to Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary and head of the UK civil service. He tweeted about this GDS blog yesterday. "Good blog from @gdsteam on the work they're doing to improve the GOV.UK website for users". Goodness knows how he worked that out but he has to say these things, he's still on the hook.