The GDS said that discovery work carried out with local authorities examined transaction costs for three services - taxi licensing, concessionary travel and residential parking permitting.

While the work established the benefits of transforming these services, it did not yet reflect the cost of making the changes and maintaining GOV.UK Verify for local authorities.

In a blog post, the GDS said: “Services are delivered by multiple people and sometimes multiple departments in each local authority.

“In some cases, parts of the service are entirely outsourced, so it was difficult for those authorities to estimate the total cost (both in terms of time and money) for those parts of the service.

“In fact, no authority – even those that came well-prepared for the session – was able to provide a definitive cost for every step of their service.”

GDS will now run a number of pilot projects to test the system and drill down into costs with a number of local authorities.