The UK government is switching 23 million people off passwords

Six hundred pounds a day. That is what the UK government says it is saving on text messages alone now that people have started signing in to GOV.UK with a fingerprint instead of a password.

Passkeys went live across GOV.UK One Login on Monday for more than 23 million users, after a trial in which over 300,000 people made the switch. Nearly one in ten daily sign-ins already uses one. The pitch is speed as much as safety: the government puts a passkey login at up to eight times quicker than typing a username and password and then waiting for a code to arrive. One Login is how people check their State Pension, deal with tax and apply for childcare support, so this is not a niche corner of the internet.

What a passkey actually is, in plain terms: your phone or laptop keeps a secret that only works on one specific website, and it hands it over when your face, your fingerprint or your device PIN says so. The biometric never leaves the device, and One Login never sees it. Because the secret is tied to the real web address, a convincing fake page cannot collect it, since there is nothing for you to type and nothing for you to be talked into sending. The NCSC's phrasing is that passkeys "can't be intercepted, reused or stolen". Digital Government Minister Stephanie Peacock framed it as using "the same fingerprint or face scan they already use to unlock their phone".

Nobody is being forced. Passwords still work for anyone who prefers them. The wider point is that this option has been quietly waiting on Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and WhatsApp accounts for a while now, and a government rollout at this scale is the clearest signal yet that it is worth the five minutes. Passkeys lean on your browser being current, and Tendvane's app updater uses winget to pull Chrome, Edge and Firefox up to date in one go.