Jyoti basuita and sam culley, VerifyLocal

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduce ourselves, we work on the Verify Local team at GDS. We’re going to tell you about the work GOV.UK Verify is doing with local government.
• #3: Show of hands - who knows what Verify is? Verify is the new way to prove who you are online
• #4: It does this in a completely new way. A certified company verifies you on behalf of government. The user enters a service, is directed to GOV.UK Verify, a certified company confirms their identity, and they are then returned to the service.
• #5: Each certified company is monitored and audited to ensure they meet industry and government standards. When Verifying an identity they check: There is identity evidence - passport/driving licence Identity is real/genuine Identity is active - 180 days, Day of the Jackal Identity is not known to be fraudulent - known stolen identities Identity is associated with the user - KBVs, selfies The certified company you choose checks a range of sources to do this
• #6: The benefit of using this model, is that no one has more information than they need to perform their function. The certified company doesn’t know which service the user is accessing, Verify doesn’t know any of the user’s personal data.
• #7: We reuse personal data that already exists in various locations, e.g. passport data, credit history, rather than collecting it in one place, which would be higher risk. It’s a privacy-first approach that has been designed with experts in the field.
• #9: We want to make GOV.UK Verify available to any local authority who wants to use it, so that users have a single secure way to access all public services. The Verify Local team was founded in June 2016 to explore how we might achieve this and have been consulting with local authorities since then (123 and counting).
• #10: What’s in it for me? We think there are three main reasons why GOV.UK Verify is a good proposition for councils.
• #11: Verify does this in 2 ways: It directly automates current identity verification processes, such as relying on scanned copies of bills and manual checking of identity documents. Indirectly, and the larger opportunity, is it allows you to transform and automate your services if you can be confident someone is who they say they are. For example, if you know that your user is who they say they are, you can ask for their consent to check eligibility criteria against other government held data. We’ve proved this concept with Warwickshire County Council, who are trialling Verify in their blue badge renewals service.
• #12: GOV.UK Verify prevents the abuse of local government services. The cost of fraud to local government is estimated at £2.2 billion a year. Verify helps to mitigate this by ensuring the user is who they say they are, and they are entitled to access a service.
• #13: It enables local authorities to create more end-to-end digital services, so that council staff don’t have to manually check identity evidence and so that users can access services at their convenience, without having to compile a dossier of identity evidence.
• #15: We are using pilots: To demonstrate working local services using Verify To develop Verify to best meet local needs Running pilots means we don’t have to define our policy from the outset. We can test and learn as we go.
• #16: So in October 2016 we kicked off 2 pilots to transform local services with a cohort of councils: Residential Parking Permits Older people’s concessionary travel
• #17: SAM: Which feeds into how we’re working. I’m Sam, and I’m working on delivering the pilot projects.
• #18: Working agile allows us to iterate and keep improving, through user research and constant testing Working in the open allows us to get the feedback to do this.
• #19: You can take a look at all our updates and resources on the LDC website. There’s contact details there, so you can get in touch with the team. We’re working with LDC to host a central place for all our pilot information. If there’s one thing you take away from this presentation, it’s this website - you can catch up on our pilot progress, and sign up to the LDC newsletter.
• #20: On the LDC page we have timelines of all our events and key milestones. We update these based on feedback and demand from councils.
• #21: We’ve also got blogposts from ourselves and our pilot councils. These cover a range of topics, looking at the service design, user research, and council experiences of working with GDS.
• #22: And we’re also publishing resources we’ve developed to help councils with user research, service design and connecting a service to Verify.
• #23: At the end of each phase, we host a showcase to gather more feedback and help councils to align their transformation plans with ours. As well as looking at the pilots, we invite representatives from other GDS teams to give updates on their offering to Local Authorities. The next showcase will be at the end of our beta phase, so keep an eye out on the LDC webpage for invitations.
• #25: In the discovery and alpha phases, we established user needs for the services, and worked on designing a service that incorporated Verify. We’re now in the beta phase, which means that councils are building their own versions of services and will be testing them with real users. We hope to have some private betas ready this Autumn.
• #26: We’ve produced and iterated resources which are the key building blocks of a great digital service that uses Verify. All of these are accessible on the LDC page. We are only piloting with a handful of councils, but we want to produce things that can be of use to the whole of local government, so that as many councils as possible can benefit from our work.
• #27: Common user research toolkit and findings, based on 150 interviews in discovery; 70 in alpha. Sample consent forms, discussion guides, recruitment guidance, as well as advice for testing prototypes and producing journey maps. User research is a key part of creating a good service, and this is a really practical set of tools that we think councils can use to do their own user testing.
• #28: We’ve published service patterns which are built on the collaborative user research we’ve done. There’s one for each service, outlining user needs, what the council needs to provide the service, and the user journey. They cover the entire range of the service, from raising user awareness, to how the pass or permit gets delivered.
• #29: There’s also a common tech architecture pattern for each pilot service, so that councils can get an idea of what technology they’ll need to implement the service.
• #30: Over the course of the pilots we’ve been gathering data from councils on their business process, such as the time spent on manual identity checks. We’ve used this data as the basis for a transformation case for using Verify with council services.
• #31: And we’ve produced prototypes for each service, which anyone can use, test and feedback on. To give you a taste of the services we’re building - and to show the thing - let’s take a look at the concessionary travel prototype.
• #32: Offering a choice of Verify, and explaining the benefits to users. We ask for their consent to user the Verified data, name dob and address. For this demo, we’ll assume the user has a Verify account They sign in with 2 factor authentication, and the details are passed back to the service. The user confirms their details, as these are key for eligibility. The photo upload has been through lots of user testing, and it’s a challenge for this demographic. We’ve settled on users using a webcam on their computer or tablet. Here’s me taking a photo. I probably wouldn’t pass the manual checks though. The user then gets to decide if they’d like to get confirmation and renewal messages, which is using GOV.UK Notify, another GDS product. And that’s it, my bus pass should be on its way!
• #33: Jyoti: That’s where we’re up to so far. Looking ahead, we’re going to evaluate the pilots and using the findings to inform our strategy for extending Verify to local, including commercial and contractual frameworks.
• #34: We need your feedback to make our policy work, so let us know what you think. You can find our contact details on the local digital coalition site, tweet us at #VerifyLocal or find me and Sam after the presentation.
• #35: This is your end slide