This is true. Not having one makes regular life increasingly difficult. In many cases I am pretty sure it boils down to system designers actually not considerin

This is true. Not having one makes regular life increasingly difficult. In many cases I am pretty sure it boils down to system designers actually not considering there could be customers without one. Software won't work without the ID number to connect data to. In healthcare hospital staff typically works around this by using "Mr twelve" - 1212121212 - which is syntactically correct with the correct checksum, but not identifying an individual.