Government-issued ID cards for UK citizens might have gone away but the Government sees digital identities from the private sector as the next best thing.

Offered as part of the floated in 2011, trusted identities could let people authenticate themselves for tax credits, benefits, car tax payments, passport applications and even student loans through the one-stop gov.uk website.

In principle, almost any third party could be used as a personal identity as long as they have been passed fit as an IDA provider. Verification would be built into the system in the form of users' mobile numbers and secondary security questions, reports have said.

The self-assessment and tax sites have not been mentioned by reports from the cabinet Office but applying the same system to this service might require some re-engineering ; at the moment, HMRC's site uses tax payer reference numbers as the user name.

Motivation for the idea includes the 2013-14 roll-out of the universal credit benefit system by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the belief that access to online services won't work well if users are expected to create yet another login they are likely to forget.