Single app to access government services
The public will be able to use a single app to access dozens of online government services, from changing their driving licence to getting benefits, ministers have announced as part of plans to replace a failed £175million scheme. Steve Barclay, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, will today unveil plans for a gov.uk app that will enable users to verify their identity using features already on their smartphones, such as facial recognition or fingerprint scanning.
THE public will be able to use dozens of online government services, allowing them to change a driving licence or apply for benefits, via a new app, ministers have announced, as part of plans to replace a failed £175million scheme.
Steve Barclay, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, will today unveil proposals for a Gov.uk app that will allow users to verify their identity using features already on their smartphones, such as facial recognition or fingerprint scanning.
The Cabinet Office says the app will merge 191 different ways people can currently create Gov.uk accounts into one simple log-in process.
The announcement comes after ministers abandoned their previous project to create a single log-in system for Gov. uk called Verify. The project, announced in 2013, was scrapped in March after attracting fewer than four million of its predicted 20 million users.
Unveiling proposals for the app, Mr Barclay will say the pandemic has “heightened” the public’s expectations for how they access government services online.
“During the pandemic, people have had to interact with government services in a variety of new ways, including the NHS app and the vaccine booking service.
“People rightly expect government to be data-driven and digitally literate, and this will be a priority for me in my new role.”
The Gov.uk project follows the success of the NHS app which lets people log into it via features already on the smartphone, such as iphone’s Faceid.
The new Gov.uk app, which is expected to go live in late 2022, will allow users to access more than 300 government services on the Gov.uk website via their smartphone. The app will also notify users of changes in government policy that may affect them, such as changes to their benefits, or to act as a reminder for things such as when a driver’s licence is due to expire.
The project, which is in its early stages, does not have a set budget yet, but government sources said they expected it to cost “substantially less” than the almost £200million spent on Verify.
The announcement has prompted warnings that the app cannot become “yet another blackhole” for taxpayers money like its predecessor. Verify promised users that they would only have to prove their ID once via websites run by third parties and then they would be able to use Gov.uk without repeatedly signing in.
However, the doomed project was criticised by MPS in a 2019 report by the Public Affairs Committee, who said ministers had “vastly overestimated the benefits it could achieve”.
Commenting on the new Gov.uk app plans, Darwin Friend, policy analyst at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Ministers must ensure that this app does not become yet another blackhole for public funds as its predecessor became.”