Completed Alpha Verify project – Tower Hamlets & Hackney for digital & financial inclusion

We are delighted to have completed the Alpha phase of a project working with the London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Hackney in which GOV.UK Verify was used for local authority multi-service portals.
The Open Identity Exchange (OIX)/Government Digital Service (GDS) project set out to demonstrate how the use of data collected by local authorities can be used to help ‘thin-file customers’.
These are defined as the most vulnerable people in society who are in the greatest need of support to register for a Verify identity enabling them to access public services as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In the announcement, which came out ahead of the Think Digital Identity for Government conference taking place tomorrow, Etive explained, “Without a digital identity we make it hard for those socially, financially and economically excluded people to participate in modern economic, political and social systems.
“Our work through the Alpha project was to identify ways in which to help solve this problem for exposed people, using a common legal standard of identity through Verify.”
The Alpha project, which builds on a previous OIX Discovery project, demonstrates how the use of data collected by local authorities can help thin-file customers register for a GOV.UK Verify identity.
Etive said the project has demonstrated that local authorities collect and manage data that would have high value in the GOV.UK Verify identity proofing and verification process. This would help vulnerable people who are trying to access Universal Credits more quickly, for example, as well as other high value services such as housing.
The business case set out to demonstrate that local authorities could derive substantial value from implementing GOV.UK Verify.
Etive said, “We have modelled a workable technical solution to making local data available to GOV.UK Verify identity providers and started the process of designing a user interface that can successfully weave together local authority transactions with a streamlined GOV.UK Verify registration process.
“We are currently working on the next steps taking the outcomes from these two projects to work with real live people, services and data, through a Beta project and a wider range of local authorities.”
Organisations involved in the project include OIX, GDS, the Post Office, Mvine, Idemia, GBGroup and the Greater London Authority specifically on the business cases for London.
The executive summary of a white paper published on the project said, “We demonstrate that local authorities have sufficiently robust information governance processes in place to be able to provide quality data to identity providers (IDPs) for identity proofing and verification under the Verify scheme, and that this data would be sufficient to help the majority of thin-file customers achieve a Verify account at level of assurance 2 (LOA2).
“We show that there is a strong business case for local authorities to adopt GOV.UK Verify and that there is also a business case for IDPs to use local authority data in the identity proofing and verification process.”
This article first appeared on the Government Technology website written by David Bicknell.

For more project infomation and white papers please go to Digital Log Book.