How the Government’s Digital ID Fantasy Will Fall Apart

As we all know, our farsighted, imaginative and inspiring Prime Minister recently announced he is planning to introduce digital IDs for UK citizens. You can read about the Government’s plans here.

Some people may think it’s a good idea. Others will be dubious. I’ve just had an early experience of the likely way this will shape up.

Being the fortunate recipient of a triple-locked state pension, I was keen to cough up a measly £94 Class 2 National Insurance payments for the one year I was slightly short. I applied in April and paid that in July.

Has it been actioned? You know the answer already, don’t you?

I went online to check my state pension payments. It is, or rather was, a simple Government website login dedicated to that service. It took about 15 seconds, or at least it used to. Not anymore it doesn’t. My heart sank. Now you have to create a Gov.UK One account. This is supposed to be an impending system to access all Government services.

What, another one? Yes, indeedy.

Creating that account turned out to be a cavalcade of horrors and wasted time. You can’t just enter an email, password and a mobile number for passcodes. You need to start like that, but then it wants to take you through a nightmarish procedure to verify your identity.

This was a gateway into hell. I was on my computer. The website wanted my passport. I then also had to install a verification app on my phone that took a photo of the passport, uploaded it and then was supposed to read the chip in the passport, operating in tandem with the website on the laptop.

Now, that’s a knotty problem. My passport chip doesn’t work at Heathrow. It works everywhere else in the world I’ve used it. It works with a commercial chip reading app on my phone, but now it turns not the Gov.UK One app. After grinding round for ages, I changed to using my driving licence. The app then wanted to scan my face to compare with the licence and tried to connect me to something called Face Scan except that wouldn’t connect. Of course it wouldn’t.

Then I was told I’d have to verify my identity at the Post Office instead. Down to the nearest town I went with my passport, queued behind the usual people totally unprepared for their transactions so that was another 15 minutes. The Post Office chap couldn’t have been more helpful. He scanned the QR code Gov.UK One had helpfully supplied with his tablet, uploaded a photo of my passport and happily read the chip (instantly actually). He photographed me, sent it all up to the Government site and I headed home.

When I got there, I saw the Gov.uk One email inviting me to login to see the result.  So, I did and Gov.UK One supplied a link for the state pension site, telling me I could now proceed. I tried that, but to my incredulity it started the identity verification all over again instead as if the previous several hours had never happened. Round and round I went, going nowhere.

Eventually I tried the driving licence again. This time, inexplicably, the Face Scan worked. I was in! Only four hours after I started. You’d have thought I’d been applying for a day pass at GCHQ.

There indeed was my pension, just as it had been on the old site except that this time it hadn’t taken a few seconds to get there. It hadn’t been increased. Of course it hadn’t, despite assurance on previous calls to the Pension Service that it had been.

I called the Pension Service for an explanation as to why my pension hadn’t been increased. I had to wait 30 minutes to get through. The agent who took the call happily told me that she couldn’t get into Gov.UK One at all herself. “It’s useless,” she said. She laughed and added: “I bet it sent you back to the beginning again,” and described it as Kafkaesque. She’s given up herself.

Reassuring.

That amusing exchange of anecdotes settled, she told me my pension account was too complicated to answer my query immediately. She’d have to call me back. She did too (that was remarkable) and told me that HMRC, which sets the additional voluntary contributions amounts, had failed to associate a ‘Standard Record of Benefit’ with my account. This, mind you, had not been mentioned on any previous enquiries. I’ve never heard of it. I would, she gaily told me, have to call HMRC again and get them to do that.

Incredulous, I called HMRC. Another 30-minute wait to get through. The agent told me she’d never heard of a Standard Record of Benefit. Well, why would she have done? She put me on hold for another 30 minutes while she cranked through my data.  

Back she came to tell me that my additional contribution had gone down wrongly as a “late payment”. She’d corrected it but – wait for it – I’d have to call the Pension Service again to tell it I’d called HMRC as instructed and get it to action it. My heart sank.

This time it took 40 minutes to get through back to the Pensions Service. The agent told me it was indeed all correct now. “Why had the HMRC person not heard of a Standard Record of Benefit?” I asked. “I have no idea,” she said. Whatever it is, it had apparently now been done.

Then she told me it would now have to be sent to a specialist adviser to process and that would take another four to six weeks.

Let’s be clear. This was to process a payment I had been instructed to make by HMRC months and months ago. I am entitled to the elevated pension. I have actually paid for it.

Despite all that, I have still been subjected to the need to spend ages on the phone repeatedly talking to different people in the State Pensions Service and HMRC, every one of whom has given me a different variant on the story.

It’s an allegorical tale of the byzantine modern state, a Gormenghast edifice hamstrung by contradictory procedures, staff of varying abilities, departments that cannot interact or communicate with the same language, and hopeless inaction.

My issue was a trifle, something of such astonishing simplicity it is almost impossible to credit how much of a mess has been made of it, a mess that remains until finally I get the additional money.

To this has now been added yet another tier of digital complications involving a new Gov.UK One login system that took me four hours to sort out, requires the person to have a laptop and a smartphone as well as a passport with a chip or some other sort of electronic ID, merely to see what my pension payments are. I’m fairly tech savvy, but this drove me spare.

I only eventually sorted my issue out (for the moment) because I was able to speak to people on the phone and because I had the time to waste going down to the nearest town and have my passport scrutinised in a Post Office. And even that didn’t work properly.

And the Government seriously thinks it’s going to initiate Making Tax Digital from April 6th 2026 successfully? A system that relies on a maze of commercial software options, each of which is supposed to be integrated with HMRC’s systems. Seriously? I dread to think how some sole traders and landlords are going to cope when the inevitable problems arise and they are plunged into black holes of digital despair and automated penalties. And there won’t be anything like enough people at the end of a phone line to help, let alone any of them who will actually know how to sort any problems out.

This is also the Government that thinks it’s going to impose digital IDs. Don’t make me laugh. Any such system might work for some people, but for anyone encountering a problem one can only start to imagine how much misery and frustration will be coming their way.

Perhaps we should be grateful. These days there’s lots of talk about an impending financial crash. I think it’s more likely the whole system of government will fall apart first. The sheer extravagance of the scale of the ineptitude and all-round crappiness of what I’ve experienced in the last 24 hours was unprecedented for me, though I have no doubt everyone and anyone reading this will have their own stories to tell that are at least as bad and probably worse.

Stop Press: I emailed the Gov.UK One help service, explaining what had happened. This is the email I received back. What I’d written had been totally ignored:

Thanks for contacting GOV.UK One Login team. I am sorry you’ve had problems using GOV.UK One Login.

If you are still facing issues please reply to this email with a detail of the service you were trying to access for example (DBS or Companies House) and what exactly were you struggling with.

I might as well have emailed the cat. “DBS” stands for Disclosure and Barring Service. And what has Companies House got to do with it? Hold onto your hats, folks. We’re in for a helluva ride.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and author with numerous books to his credit, mostly concerning the ancient world and the diarist Samuel Pepys. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025).