Guest Blog: Beyond the national digital ID scheme: what's next for digital identity in the UK?

One of the first acts of the incoming prime minister has been to scrap plans for a national digital ID scheme. For a policy that arrived with a great deal of noise, a mandatory right-to-work credential and a petition approaching three million signatures, its exit has been comparatively quiet.

It would be easy to read the headline as a step backwards for digital identity in the UK. I don't think it is. If anything, it's a moment to be clear about something the debate often lost sight of.

What was actually scrapped and what wasn't

The decision ends a specific proposal: a universal, government-issued identity credential that every adult would have been expected to hold. It does not end digital identity in the UK, and it's worth being precise about what remains in place.

GOV.UK One Login continues to provide access to government services. The Digital Verification Services (DVS) Trust Framework, the accreditation regime that governs private-sector identity providers, is untouched and still backed by legislation. The government's plans for a GOV.UK Wallet holding digital versions of official documents also haven't gone anywhere: the veterans card is already available, with the digital driving licence and, later, the passport to follow.

In other words, the scaffolding for a genuinely useful digital identity ecosystem is still standing. What's gone is a single scheme that, in its original form, largely duplicated coverage the public already had.

Why the scheme struggled to make its case

One Login isn't perfect, but for the large majority of the population, in the region of 85%, it already works to prove who you are and reach government services. Creation of a One Login account follows Good Practice Guide 45 (GPG45), which sets out the evidence needed to establish an identity to a given level of confidence: typically a passport, a driving licence, is required as part of this process.

That standard is also the source of the real gap. Not everyone in the UK holds a passport or a driving licence, and not everyone has the kind of credit or data footprint needed for GPG45 aligned identity proofing. For that segment of the population, the digital front door simply doesn't open.

The national scheme was, in the long run, meant to close that gap. But the plans front and centre of the debate would first have served people who were already well covered by One Login, which meant that, in the short term at least, it was hard to point to what problem it actually solved.

The problem that hasn't gone away

None of this makes the underlying challenge disappear. There is still a portion of the public, by some estimates as many as 8 million adults, who face barriers to digital services and cannot easily prove their identity online. Scrapping a scheme doesn't help them; it just leaves the gap where it was.

The more proportionate answer could arguably be to issue a digital identifier to the people who are currently underserved, and to let them use it within a service that already exists, for example something similar to One Login, rather than rebuilding the whole edifice around them. That kind of targeted approach closes the inclusion gap at a fraction of the cost and disruption. It may well be the direction things take from here.

What it means for the general public

For most people, very little changes day to day, and that's the point. If you want to verify yourself digitally, you still can, through the growing number of trusted private-sector providers operating under the DVS Trust Framework. As the GOV.UK Wallet rolls out, the option to carry digital versions of your documents rather than the physical article is still coming. Plenty of us will be glad to leave the drivers licence in a drawer once everything else already lives on our phones.

The prize worth keeping in view is choice. People should be able to prove who they are in the way that suits them, either by using a private-sector digital identity, a government one now or in future, a document upload, or perhaps using Open Banking, rather than being funnelled into a single mandated route.

What's next for digital identity

The way organisations approach digital identity remains unchanged. The challenge facing the relying party e.g. the bank, the letting agent, the employer has remains the same as well: establishing with confidence who a customer is.

Their difficulty is straightforward: no single identity scheme has reached critical mass, so integrating any one of them delivers little immediate benefit. Customers still end up proving their identity the traditional way, and the relying party has carried the integration cost for nothing.

What is required is a single integration that lets an organisation accept whatever form of identity a customer chooses to bring, and that takes the integration burden off their shoulders. Then behind that one connection should sit multiple verification routes, biometrics and document checks, bureau data, fraud intelligence, and increasingly Open Banking and consumer-held digital identity. More importantly this single system should work out what more, if anything, it needs to be confident.

Ultimately, the opportunity is to make identity verification more flexible, inclusive and efficient. Which is why the next phase of digital identity will be driven by interoperability, choice and a single connection.

The European backdrop

This last point matters more than it might appear. The European Commission has required every member state to make at least one accredited digital identity wallet available to its citizens by the end of 2026. As those wallets come online, UK relying parties will increasingly encounter customers who hold one. An enabling service that can accept an EU digital identity alongside a UK one turns cross-border verification from a headache into a feature.

The bottom line

The UK's digital identity economy remains strong, and the private sector is more than capable of meeting the public's needs. The national scheme's departure doesn't weaken that ecosystem, it clarifies where the momentum will actually come from: not a single mandated credential, but an open, competitive market of trusted providers, enabled to work together.