Following the news that the NHS COVID Pass system failed on Thursday 18 August;

David Bicknell, Principal Analyst in the Thematic Intelligence Team at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“Digital identity has gained impetus worldwide because apps like the NHS COVID Pass enabled people to prove they had been vaccinated so they could travel. Since UK travellers rely on online access to the COVID Pass, service failures like this will only hurt user confidence in digital tools that are designed to help people prove their identity.

“Countries adopting digital identity technology have up to 10 years of growth ahead. However, governments continually make the same mistake, preaching to citizens about how digital identity improves the user experience rather than delivering a reliable service.

“That is why, for the NHS COVID Pass to be unavailable for several hours yesterday – and for users to have, as the app said, ‘no alternative route for accessing information via the NHS app or online’ – is an unacceptable systems failure. NHS Digital must explain how the failure occurred and why no service back-ups were in place.”