The lack of ID card based auth isn't really the fault of the team behind gov.uk, who provide the best service they can for government SSO in the form of Verify:

The lack of ID card based auth isn't really the fault of the team behind gov.uk, who provide the best service they can for government SSO in the form of Verify: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk-verify/introducing-govuk-verify https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk... National ID cards are a particularly thorny issue politically, there's been a few attempts to introduce them, all of which have been noisily shut down in parliament because of privacy concerns. There isn't really any single database of people in the UK, with different ministries having their own databases. In principle this seems like a pretty good approach, even if it does mean that things like authentication with web services is a bit clunky.