hear hear !

I find the Government Gateway to be appalling in this respect. The GG itself has no functionality, you cannot even access the services which you are registered to use from its pages.

It allocates massively long UserIDs which are random alphanumerics and consequently immemorable, and it [i]sends them out in the mail[/i] – how electronic is that ?

It also allocates new UserIDs when you add new services with some Govt departments, so I have an Inland Revenue ID (well 3 actually) and 2 Customs & Excise IDs when there is in fact only one of me.

We need an appropriate level of security – something like amazon.co.uk or bt.com – where we choose a single user ID and a password we can remember.

If the GG is to provide a centralised authentication service it needs to become an invisible back-office function accessed from user departments websites, and not pretend to be a gateway when in fact it is a brick wall.