June 2006 – IAAC’s Roadmap for Identity Assurance in the UK

IAAC was amongst the first to recognise that trustworthy identities would have a central role to play in the future digital society. It also recognised in early 2006 that there was at that stage no agreement then regarding the desired goals any future assured identity developments should achieve, nor any programme for how to achieve those goals.

In July 2006, IAAC published its Roadmap for Identity Assurance in the UK. The aim of this Roadmap was to stimulate a greater understanding of assured identities within the context of the evolving digital society and to set out directions for future research and development.

The roadmap envisaged three phases of activity:

UK Government had, by 2006, shown a clear intention to develop a national identity scheme (NIS) and to use strong identity techniques and technologies to underpin, amongst other things, the cost-efficient delivery of a wide range of on-line public services. IAAC reasoned that the development of a UK NIS would create risks and ramifications well beyond the scope of the UK Government's specific identity plans. Given how central a person's identity would be to many of their daily activities, IAAC considered it essential that UK policy should be conducted within a full understanding of those risks and ramifications. This perspective provided the backdrop to the rest of IAAC's two-year Identity Assurance workplan.