As of last month, the tax agency is finally advising citizens visiting GOV.UK to create a tax account that they may be able to do so via the GDS tool
HM Revenue and Customs has finally entered a public beta testing phase in which “controlled numbers of new users” can sign up for an account to access the department’s services using the GOV.UK One Login tool.
This relatively small-scale adoption of the new cross-government sign-in service comes as HMRC continues to plan for the migration of tens of millions of citizens from the Government Gateway system that has been in place for 25 years – and formally engaged in a decommissioning process for the past decade.
As of the first week of last month, users visiting the public GOV.UK page for registering for a new account through which they can access HMRC services are advised that they may be able to do so via One Login.
Exchequer secretary to the Treasury Dan Tomlinson said that this public beta phase – which does not cover citizens that are among the 50 million registered users of Government Gateway, nor any business users or tax agents – will run until June. During this time the intention is to use One Login to connect “controlled numbers of new users” to HMRC’s personal tax services.
Sometime “later this year” there will be “ full go-live for [all] new individual customers”, according to the minister.
“This will be followed by existing individuals – those with a Government Gateway account – and agents and organisations, as set out in the [HMRC] Transformation Roadmap,” he added.
The tax agency has previously indicated that, from spring 2024, it would start migrating “small numbers” of both new and existing users of Government Gateway, with a phased switchover to follow.
But, over the past two years, HMRC’s adoption of One Login has remained very limited, and confined to internal or private beta initiatives.
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The launch of the public beta phase – albeit more than a year after the Government Digital Service had originally planned that almost all departmental services would use One Login – marks a small, but significant step forward.
But the biggest challenge will lie in subsequently moving tens of millions of Government Gateway users over to the new system. The transformation roadmap referenced by Tomlinson states that HMRC has “an aim to start onboarding [these users] to GOV.UK One Login towards the end of 2026 to 2027”.
Beyond this approximate start date, the document does not provide a timeline for doing so.
Ministers have previously stated that Government Gateway will be ready to be safely turned off by the end of the current parliament in 2029.
Whenever the process is concluded, it will have taken significantly longer than predicted in any one of a number of previous estimates – beginning with the appointment 10 years ago of a supplier to deliver the decommissioning of Government Gateway by March 2018.
A decade on, and HMRC is still entering into multi-year deals with external data partners to support the operation of the ageing platform. Meanwhile, One Login has now grown to a user base of more than 13 million people.
The HMRC Transformation Roadmap says: “Over time, the way customers register and authenticate to use digital services will be simplified through GOV.UK One Login. This is a single sign-in and identity checking solution that will provide a simple route for customers to access government services.”
