Money Advice Trust’s new report ‘Tell us š¾Ģ¶šĢ¶šĢ¶šĢ¶ Twenty’, is a review of initiatives that allow people to share their support needs with multiple organisations. It is a follow up its 2024 report outlining 10 guiding principles to help design better data-sharing schemes and finds that, in 2026, there are at least 20 ‘Tell Us Once’ initiatives in operation in the UK, spanning sectors from energy to education, and circumstances from death to direct debits.
āTell Us Onceā (TUO) is a simple idea – rather than repeating their circumstances and needs to multiple organisations, consumers, including vulnerable and disabled customers, can explain things just onceĀ and then get the support they require from that point onwards.
Until now, no-one knew how many TUO approaches were operating in the UK, how they worked or what their strengths and areas for improvement were. Reflecting a fragmented and unconnected landscape of TUO initiatives, the report argues that calls to create one single TUO system are too ambitious at the current time.
Instead, Money Advice Trust contends that we should focus on improved sharing – controlled by users – between existing schemes, with three key recommendations:
- The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) must consider TUO approaches (despite their UK growth, there is only one reference to TUO in all existing ICO guidance)
- Energy, water, and financial TUO systems must sign-post to each other (so people completing a TUO journey in one sector, can do this for another)
- The Smart Data Council should create the conditions for standardised definitions of the most common support needs (to aid data sharing between firms and sectors)