A few years ago I set up a new company in the UK. The government here has invested quite heavily in digital services so this can be almost entirely completed on-line. You begin the process by notifying Companies House, the venerable UK registrar for companies (for 180 years this year), that you have set up a company. In order for you to do that on-line the Government needs to have some sort of user registration system and one that is a bit more secure than your regular website.
Enter the Government Gateway, a government-wide ID system launched in 2001. It was initially designed to be a one-stop-shop that would provide a log-on solution for all of the UK government's on-line services. Whether you were a business/organisation or an individual citizen, with security credentials backed up by GCHQ no less.
The Companies House process was exceptionally straightforward and a Government Gateway ID (GG ID) was set up by Companies House for the business. No problems.
Another early task in setting up in business is to inform His Majesty's Revenue & Customs service (aka the Taxman) that you are ready to start trading. Rather than just letting the business use its' existing GG ID, HMRC took it upon themselves to issue another one. As there was a whole mountain of 'other things' to be done during this set-up phase, sorting out the duplicate GG IDs fell slowly to the bottom of a very large pile of things to do.
Fast forward to today and the duplicate GG ID issue resurfaced from the depths of the company's To-Do list. By this time only one of the GG IDs was being used regularly, but having an unused open log-on is a security risk for anything. Perhaps now would be a good time to find out whether it was still extant and, if it was, delete it.
But how to go about deleting an existing Gateway ID? My first attempt was simply to try and use the unused GG ID. As it had never been used I had no password for it, so I tried to reset the password, which led me into a bunker. I entered the GG ID and asked for a password reset, the system duly sent me a password, but when I entered that, the system just spat out an error message.
Try as a I might I couldn't get round this. I was stumped.
Where do you go when you don't know how to do something?
These days my first port of call is often Copilot, which in this instance gave nothing useful and instead talked about the new Government One Login service. It's only an AI, so no harm, no foul. The next option is the old reliable Google it approach, which gave lots of results but nothing specific. OK, how about the Government's search service, only 5,852 results this time, but again nothing helpful that specifically addressed the issue of how to close a GG ID account. Erm, YouTube? Nada. Well until about 3 weeks ago when Audrey posted a video (It appears to be a US AI site? A bit bizarre that it should show up exactly at the time I was looking for an answer, but perhaps the site owner is scanning some sort of feed of Google searches).
Well I have done my best to DIY an answer to this question, so now I am going to have to phone a friend and, as HMRC seems to be the biggest user of GG IDs, I will try their Online Support Services Helpdesk. Bear in mind that as this is the helpdesk solely for using HMRC's website, not the whole UK tax service, they really should be the experts on their systems.
I don't have a transcript of the call, but the nice, if somewhat confused, support agent who answered when I got through the inevitable telephone rubric tried to help. However they could only see information about the GG ID that was connected to HMRC services and couldn't tell me whether the other one was active or not, only that it wasn't connected to any HMRC services. That really didn't answer my question so I asked who runs the GG ID system and at this point reached the end of her knowledge about the system.
That brought me back to square one.
After more Googling on the question of who runs the GG ID system, the only thing I could turn up was a mention in a Computer World article that it was the responsibility of something called the Government Digital Service (GDS). I did try going to the root of the domain (www.access.service.gov.uk) that is present when logging on with a GG ID but that led nowhere.
So, off to the Government Digital Service website to see if I could get some help. But, and you couldn't make this up, the only way to get in touch with the GDS is via pre-1876 technology. That's right they still require you to use the postal service that was superseded by the telephone almost a century and a half ago. Any actual digital communication services? No thanks, we can't manage that. A search of their website revealed zero mentions of the Government Gateway so now I don't even know if they are involved with it or not. Another step backwards.
But, their website did tell me that the GDS was part of the Cabinet Office, who did have a contact e-mail. For those of you reading outside of the UK, this is the office of the Prime Minister. Yes, I actually had to e-mail the heart of government in the UK to get an answer to the simple question of 'How do I delete a Government Gateway ID?' I duly sent in my question very briefly describing the situation and asking them if they could give me the contact details of whomever ran the GG ID system for HMG.
To give credit where it is due, the Cabinet Office did make the wheels turn and a week or so later I got two responses from HMRC (as they, apparently, have operational management responsibility for the Gateway ID system now). One from the Online Services Helpdesk and another from the Digital Complaints Team both conveying the same set of instructions, which I will post elsewhere. Armed with this knowledge I returned to the HMRC log-on page.
This time I entered the unused GG ID but for some unknown reason decided to try the password from the used one, only to receive,
Arrghh, the one thing I didn’t try at the start! Mostly because it doesn't make any sense to do so🙈.
OK, job done? Looks like I didn't actually need the instructions after all 😞. Realistically I am still not sure whether GG ID is _actually_ deleted but HMRC have said that it is and no-one can say I didn't try to sort it out…
Out of interest I put some of the phrases from my newly extracted knowledge back into a Google search and came up with a single page (from the whole Internet) on something called WEFO Online from the Welsh government pages. Nice one. This is the informational equivalent of the HMRC displaying the instructions in a locked filing cabinet labelled "Beware of the Jaguar" in a disused toilet stall in an unlit basement (pace Douglas Adams).
But I am not just going to sit and whine. I can do something about this.
The HMRC runs a Community Forum that I have a long-unused log-on for. I can put a post with the instructions onto the Forum and Google's indexer will pick it up and the next time some poor sod needs that piece of information it will be readily available to them. Let's end on a high note!
Off to the HMRC Community Forums webpage. Hmm, I got an "Invalid sign-in attempt" response, perhaps I got the password wrong, I'll reset it. Waiting for the e-mail, waiting, waiting. Isn't working? OK I'll set up a new account, but this too isn't working. I'd better report the problem,
Can you actually believe it? Two broken log-on services and the error reporting service broken as well!! OK, I'll give them some feedback suggesting that they might want to provide a website that is aware of when it is broken and informs the user of that fact. LOL, the feedback page is also broken.
What is going on? We invented the computer, but can't even run an on-line forum and have a Digital Services Dept. that can't deal with digital communications. We are the sixth largest economy in the world and we can't string together an on-line service that allows basic questions to be answered and you have to go the heart of the country's government to get something done…
As promised here is how you Delete a Government Gateway ID.
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