10131337VouchsafeClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKOne in five UK residents don't have a passport or driving licence. Without a reliable way of proving who you are, it's hard to access vital services like banking, housing, healthcare and government support. As of this year, it isn't possible to vote in elections either. Many people in this situation are disadvantaged in other ways: they might be (or have been) homeless, survivors of domestic abuse, refugees or unpaid carers. The problem is not limited to the UK. The World Bank believes there are 1 billion people in this situation. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 describes the need to provide legal identity for all by 2030\. Currently, verifying identity without a document is done through awkward 'knowledge-based verification'. This involves asking questions from the person's credit file. This is a poor user experience and is impossible for the many users who have a thin or non-existent credit file (up to 20m in the UK according to Experian). **Carefree** is a charity that provides free breaks for unpaid full-time carers. They work with large hotel operators who donate excess capacity. Carefree makes this available to carers through a booking platform. A large portion of Carefree's users self-refer; and must provide proof of their identity and caring status to prevent fraud. About 900 self-referrals are started each month with a completion rate of 60%. Carefree are regularly contacted by users who lack ID and estimate that a significant proportion of incompletions are due to this. **Vouchsafe** is a tech-for-good company that is building a new kind of identity verification tool that allows users to prove who they are by having someone they trust vouch for them. The process will be automatic, quick and free to the person being verified. The first customer of Vouchsafe is the Scottish Government, where it will be used to allow access to an increasing number of government services. We are asking for Innovate UK's help to fund a user-centred and systemic design project to investigate how Vouchsafe can be applied to the charity sector, starting with Carefree. The short-term goal of the project will be to improve Carefree's completion rate and provide breaks to more carers. Carefree aims to marry technology with community spirit to solve critical challenges. This is a good fit for Vouchsafe's ideals, and we believe this collaboration is ideally placed to test and solve an important and valuable problem.