Working towards stronger Digital Identity in government

Our regular chairman, David Bicknell, welcomes all delegates, sponsors, and speakers to our conference and sets out the day’s agenda.

Natalie Jones, Director for Digital Identity from GDS will discuss the current state of play of digital identity for the whole economy and plans for future policy development of digital identity across the public sector as a whole. 

Social inclusion and digital identity go hand-in-hand. Government’s, perhaps more than any other sector need to ensure that digital services are accessible by all.

How can the tech industry help government to formulate meaningful policy around social inclusion?

How can the design of fully accessible identity for all turn citizen identity into an enabling technology?

This session is set aside for insight and discussion with some of the leading suppliers in digital identity product and services.

The mobile device has taken on almost god-like status in the everyday life of citizens. It seems that we can no longer move from room to room, let alone leave the house without our beloved phone. As such, the mobile device may offer a useful way for many (but not all) citizens to interact with government. This discussion will explore the ways in which mobile devices can act to present identity claims for government services.

The panel will be able to answer questions on advances in mobile identity, such as the use of Apple Wallet to hold driver’s license details and self sovereign apps. The discussion will also looks at what part mobile operators can play in providing verified data into the government services ecosystem.

Expanding upon this, the panel will look at the types of data that a mobile operator can provide during an online transaction to create more secure identity-based government services.

This panel session will discuss the procurement procedure for this project, how it can be used in government for all levels of transaction and if it could even be used in commercial transactions.

During the pandemic, the world has seen constraints on both public and private sector organisations that primarily relied on paper-based and face to face methods of identity verification. The world needed to keep moving. Recruits needed to continue their onboarding processes, and administrative staff had to be certain that new employees had the credentials and qualifications required to carry out specialised work. Doctors needed to travel between new clinics and hospitals quickly to save lives. Students needed to keep learning and enrolling on virtual platforms. Organisations have used numerous digital methods to tackle identity verification and proofing to deploy resources smoothly and securely. How can the public sector use decentralised identity to build and maintain trusted digital transactions with staff, within government departments, and citizens?

This session will explore the opportunities, benefits and use cases of decentralised identity across higher education, industrial, healthcare, and beyond, focusing on:

• Onboarding
• Identity portability
• Access to high-value resources

The Pension Dashboard has been a complex system to develop. Many people have several pensions and often need to delegate pension management. Most pension systems are manual, and paper based, authorisation for a financial advisor to act on your behalf is done on paper. How can this highly manual process be expressed in the digital world, especially if the demographic is non-digital native?

This session will explore the ways and means of making pension management and access digital and how entitlement and delegation fit into a digital identity-driven system.

Local government is increasingly looking how citizen services can be replicated / replaced by digital versions. How can this be done so that all citizens have equal access to these services and in a way that secure against fraud when identity document such as birth, marriage, and death certificates are used?

Our citizens live in a mobile-first society. What not everybody knows is that mobile phones are a great foundation for identity verification, in combination with chipped identity documents. But how does this work? Also, is it acceptable for our citizens and people from outside the UK?

This session will consider how the UK Home Office EU Settlement Scheme programme that has used this possibility with tremendous success.

ISO 18013-5 conformant mDLs (mobile driver’s licenses) are on their way. Questions that will be discussed include:

• What implications do mDLs have for privacy and security risks?
• Are UK police forces ready to process mDLs from overseas drivers?

The presentation of a central government digital identity case study from a UK contributor.

This regular session looks at examples of best digital identity practice, experiences, and learnings from identity experts across Europe and beyond.

Digital ID is becoming the gateway to the resources and opportunities and the incentives to misuse, commit fraud, breach or manipulate these systems are growing with their scope. We need to look at how we can make digital infrastructure for ID systems trustworthy by confronting evolving risks and evocative issues.

There is a commonality to issues faced by countries across the globe: What are the socio-political impacts of digital ID? What are the best governance frameworks to protect users of digital ID systems? How can we ensure that they protect the most vulnerable in society?

The answers to these questions lie in security systems that are confidential, delivered with integrity and are available to those in a format who need it most. Privacy and ethics will help ensure that systems are transparent and can be controlled. These pillars will make an approach to trustworthy ID robust in the face of unexpected events/environments and resilient to stress and the need to react. Consideration of how to build trustworthiness into these dimensions is a key focus of the Gates project at The Alan Turing Institute.

We close with our regular panel session discussing what tomorrow’s identity sector might look like.

Our chair, David Bicknell, summarises the of the sessions that you have heard today and closes the conference.