Newbie pensioner here

ali_bear

There was some talk about the Govt wanting to bring in a system of national ID cards. Presumably this would address your issue. But expect to wait 5 years or more for that to come about, if at all. 

BobR64

ali_bear said:

There was some talk about the Govt wanting to bring in a system of national ID cards. Presumably this would address your issue. But expect to wait 5 years or more for that to come about, if at all. 

Whenever this is talked about, there are always people up in arms about "big brother" and suchlike, despite it being perfectly normal to have national ID in various Western countries. Meanwhile, we increasingly need to have ID in any case for all sorts of things and, in typical British fashion, we end up with an ad hoc, half-baked approach of having passports and driving licences substituting for a national ID.

cfw1994

We eachgot a Citizen Card a few years ago: Martin Lewis highlighted it was free for a while (looks like £18 now - https://www.citizencard.com).
When we go on hols, one of us has the others card, in case something goes missing.
Has photo ID on.
Might be a useful option.

Marcon

cfw1994 said:

We eachgot a Citizen Card a few years ago: Martin Lewis highlighted it was free for a while (looks like £18 now - https://www.citizencard.com).
When we go on hols, one of us has the others card, in case something goes missing.
Has photo ID on.
Might be a useful option.

It's still free for certain groups, but the snag is that (like so many things in life!) it only does certain things - and acting as proof ID for Government Gateway and many other services isn't one of them. Yet again we have a mess of cards and documents with no common purpose...