GDS and Cabinet Office admit to over-optimism over Verify

Projections set for the Gov.uk Verify platform were “hopelessly optimistic” in its original business case, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard this week.

The system’s architects the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Cabinet Office faced questions around themes ranging from cost to poor performance in an inquiry aimed at investigating the issues around its flagship digital identity system and the £154m spent so far.

Civil service chief executive John Manzoni, Kevin Cunnington, director general at GDS, and former Verify boss Nic Harrison, now director of design, planning and architecture at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), were challenged by MPs over indications that Verify would not meet its targets, as well as decisions taken to continue and the future plan once public funding stops in 2020.

When justifying the expectations for Verify in its 2015 business case, Manzoni said its creators expected a faster pace of transformation would happen across government services.

“There is no question but that that was optimistic, and it is not as if people were blind about it,” said Manzoni, adding that there was also an element of attempting to assert that volume could be built by telling departments to use Verify.

“I fully hold my hands up that we were a bit slow in intervening in that, because I don’t think the incentives for government departments were helpful for it, for perfectly good reasons, because they had not transformed their services and because there was a start-up problem of cost,” said Manzoni.

While Cunnington justified the low uptake by saying that there weren’t enough adopting services, Manzoni confirmed PAC chair Meg Hiller’s affirmation that the project was “over-optimistic from the beginning”.

Later in the hearing, Manzoni illustrated his point of over-optimism by pointing out the mood was similar around Universal Credit in its early days and that today, the government “knows a lot more” about the pace of digital transformation.

“Increasing realism, of course, makes it difficult to sit here and argue and justify, but back then, there were lots of examples of where we thought that we would go faster than we actually have done,” said Manzoni.

“You can digitise services, but it is a lot harder to fundamentally transform them to enable the Verify access.”  

Harrison said that after he joined GDS in October 2016, he identified problems with the project and made 11 recommendations for Verify.

“I think my report said directly that Verify was not on a glide path to success, so we needed to intervene and do things,” he said. “I made a number of recommendations, many of which we took into action.”