what's going on and casts a critical eye over value. People seem remarkably reticent to discuss something that is a pretty big feature on the government technology landscape. If they do praise it, it looks like this , emphasising the benefits to service providers of using its protocols and messaging, but glossing over the broken stuff with phrases like "allows citizens to have one user ID and password". Yes. In theory. Oh pur-lease. 4. It's not Your Account for Government. It never can be. It's designed not to be. This is a particularly pernicious failing. It raises expectations that it should, somehow, be a single connection point between citizen and state online. When it's compromised, we panic . When it fails to add any value, we're disappointed. We've been, effectively, duped into thinking some sort of useful, usable functionality has been added. It hasn't. 5. It fundamentally misreads individual user behaviour online. People do share and lose their IDs and passwords. Putting in a wait for the postman does result in everything having to be redone, and in sapping user confidence in government's online services. The situation is slightly better for businesses, and I will concede that for business-facing transactions (and for accountants, agents and other intermediaries), Gateway R&E probably does add some value. But there's a hell of a difference between employing someone whose job it is to get these processes right, and providing services to individuals. One can see why Gateway R&E had some attractions: ten years ago,