The DWP is seeking powers to require banks to trawl the accounts of millions of people who receive benefits. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Campaigners say ‘fully automated’ approach risks repeat of Post Office Horizon scandal
Plans for automated surveillance of millions of bank accounts to catch welfare cheats should be scrapped, campaigners have said, warning the approach risks a repeat of the Post Office Horizon scandal.
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But campaigners for welfare claimants, disabled people, human rights and privacy warned ministers it represents an “unprecedented and disproportionate invasion of the public’s financial privacy, the effect of which will be felt most sharply by the most vulnerable”.
The net would also trawl the private banking data of people related to welfare claimants including partners, parents and landlords. It would save around £360m a year – less than 5% of the total lost to welfare fraud, according to the government’s best estimate.
In a letter to Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, 42 organisations, from Disability Rights UK to Big Brother Watch, said: “There are approximately 22.6 million individuals in the welfare system, including those who are disabled, sick, caregivers, job seekers, and pensioners. They should not be treated like criminals by default … The Horizon scandal saw hundreds of people wrongfully prosecuted using data from faulty software. The government must learn from this mistake – not replicate it en masse.”
A petition calling on the government to take urgent action to support the introduction of an Essentials Guarantee was presented to political parties in Westminster this week.
Research commissioned by the Trussell Trust has found more than half of recipients of Universal Credit do not have enough money for food.
The study was carried out by YouGov on behalf of the Trussell Trust. It found that 2.4 million claimants (37 percent) had fallen into debt because they could not keep up with essential bills. Two in five (42 percent) reported being behind on one or more household bill.
The research suggested that 780,000 claimants of Universal Credit had been driven to use a foodbank during the month December 2023 to January 2024. More than half of the recipients who were surveyed said they had run out of food. In the previous 12 months, 22 percent of Universal Credit claimants reported being unable to cook hot food as they could not afford to use their own or other utilities. 52 percent said they were behind on their bills and credit commitments or were finding keeping up with them a constant struggle.
From April, the £90 weekly Universal Credit standard allowance is £30 less than the weekly cost of essential items for a singly person, says the charity. It is calling on the Chancellor to provide greater support for people on the lowest incomes in next week’s Spring Budget, including an extension to the Household Support Fund.
The UK has the worst safety net for the unemployed in north-west Europe
Viewers have taken issue with a statement by Tory MP Chris Philp who claimed that the UK’s benefits system is ‘very generous’, in an interview this morning.
Speaking to Sky News on the steep rise of shoplifting, the Policing Minister was asked if he had any sympathy for people stealing for food. He argued that there was “no excuse” because the UK’s benefits system is “very generous”.
Philp said: “We have a very generous benefits system, we’re spending well over £100 billion on working-age benefits, they went up by 10% in April this year they’ll go up by another 6 or 7%. National Minimum Wage has just gone up by around 10%. There is no excuse at all for any criminal activity, including shoplifting.”
However, people were not impressed at being told by a politician, who’s current net worth is around £3 million, that the benefits system is ‘very generous’. One X user responded: “Here is a challenge for Chris Philp – try living on ‘generous’ UK benefits for a month and then report back.”
Another wrote: “Clearly living in his own bubble. How disconnected from reality. The rental prices, bills have risen to unmanageable levels, the benefit system is completely inadequate.”
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has threatened to cut benefits for people with disabilities and long-term illnesses who do not get a remote job | Nathan Stirk/Getty Images
The long-term effects of a dangerously mismanaged pandemic and cuts to health and social care are kicking in, with a record 2.5 million working-age people in the UK having disabilities or long-term health conditions that prevent or restrict their ability to work.
This should be the time to reform our punitive welfare system, which fewer Britons than ever believe offers enough support to those who need it. Instead, chancellor Jeremy Hunt has used his autumn statement to inflict yet more pain.
Hunt announced plans to stop people who are unemployed but not actively looking for work due to long-term sickness or disability from claiming free prescriptions and discounted bus travel, as well as to tell people they must find remote jobs or risk losing their benefits.
The news is hardly surprising – the government has long tried to paint Disabled people as ‘scroungers’. Yesterday, Laura Trott, chief secretary to the Treasury, callously told interviewers that Disabled or ill people have “a duty” to work. And just last month, Hunt promised to review benefit sanctions, telling the Conservative Party conference that “around 100,000 people are leaving the labour market every year for a life on benefits”.
What Hunt omitted, though, is that the UK already has one of the least generous welfare systems in Western Europe. Disabled people have lost an average of £1,200 a year between 2008 and 2019 due to a series of cuts and reforms, including the introduction of Employment and Support Allowance, the Work Capability Assessment, Personal Independence Payment, the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, the two-child limit, and Universal Credit.
A reduction in financial support can be difficult for anyone. But for Disabled people, it’s devastating. A household with at least one Disabled adult or child needs an additional £975 a month to have the same standard of living as non-disabled households, according to Scope disability rights charity.
The government is well aware of the mental anguish our threadbare welfare system causes. Just this week, a coroner warned work and pensions secretary Mel Stride that the system can worsen symptoms of mental illness, after a man whose “anxiety was exacerbated by his application for Universal Credit” died by suicide. The number of secret reviews into the deaths of benefit claimants carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has also more than doubled over the past three years.
Emma, a freelance benefits adviser in Greater London who requested that their surname not be published, knows better than most how to navigate the welfare system – they spend their working life helping others to do so.
Yet even Emma was told last year that their Hypermobile-Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome didn’t classify them for an enhanced Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is designed to help a person with an illness, disability or mental health condition with everyday life. This money would have been a lifeline for Emma, who, despite being in work, was struggling to cover the extra costs that many Disabled people face, including, in their case, the purchase of two wheelchairs and an E-bike to help them get around.
“As a benefits adviser myself, I was able to give examples of how I met the enhanced rate mobility descriptors,” she said, referring to the criteria that must be met to be eligible for the enhanced mobility element of PIP, which is worth £71 a week. “But the caseworker [at the DWP] still refused and eventually offered me the standard rate [of £26.90 a week].”
“The whole process was incredibly stressful… He told me I had to decide there and then whether to accept his offer and that there would be no point in taking the appeal further as it would be unsuccessful.”
Pushing Disabled people towards work with threats often results in them becoming more unwell and further from the labour marketTom Pollard, head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation
Emma eventually worked with Citizens Advice to lodge a new appeal, which was successful, but it took them months to eventually receive PIP, making dealing with the additional costs associated with disability very difficult.
Having witnessed firsthand the difficulties of the current welfare system, Emma branded “current conversations” about sanctions and “getting people back to work” as “scary”.
They said: “Sanctions are an easy way [for the government] to save some money, at a time when finances are under pressure and scrutiny and they don’t know of a better way. And because they don’t understand the ramifications that sanctions will have on Disabled people”.
Emma’s sentiment was echoed by Tom Pollard, head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation. He told openDemocracy that Hunt’s threats to sanction people who do not find work will backfire and fail to achieve their stated aims.
“Any attempt to push [Disabled people] towards work by applying pressure and threats often simply results in people becoming more unwell and further from the labour market,” Pollard explained.
Labour’s position, should it take power next year, is not much better than the Tories’. In January, the then shadow work and pensions secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, announced that there would be “conditionality” – which requires people to behave a certain way to access benefits – in any welfare system the party oversees. This line appears unchanged, despite claims on the fringes of the Labour conference that the party would “co-produce” its benefits system with Disabled people.
That both of the biggest parties are resorting to threats of further sanctions or more conditionality is indicative of a system in desperate need of repair, said Geoff Fimister, policy co-chair at the Disability Benefits Consortium. “Ministers have so little confidence in what is on offer,” he explained, “that they feel they need to resort to threats to promote uptake.”
Linda Burnip from Disabled People Against Cuts, agreed, saying: “[Politicians] aren’t interested in how a good system works.” She added: “Ideologically, their only interest is in removing state aid to those who need it.”
The social security system should be an essential public service – a piece of social infrastructure that ensures we all have access to the right support when we need it. But after years of dire cuts and reforms, it has been torn apart. Hunt’s crackdown will only serve to worsen it, with disastrous consequences for those who are reliant on it.
This should be our moment for creating a system built on respect, dignity and support, that enables us to live the lives we deserve – not imprison us. We should be introducing a Guaranteed Decent Income – based on 50% of the minimum wage – and doing away with punitive sanctions, benefit caps, bedroom tax, conditionality, five-week wait for the first payment, and the two-child limit.
These are must-haves to create a system where everyone has chances and is valued and treated as equal citizens. One that pushes through the barriers of this cross-party consensus on inflicting suffering, which is completely out of line with the general public’s views.
The welfare system has taken another hit today via a ‘benefits crackdown’ in Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement. Since the ‘welfare reform’ of 2007, disabled people have been on the receiving end of these dehumanising and punishing policies that make people out as ‘undeserving’, prioritise work over people, and make life unlivable.
But we now have evidence the Department for Work and Pensions (DPW) knows its policies kill people. It has been repeatedly warned of this fact and has even confirmed it in its own research.
It took years of campaigning by disabled people to uncover this evidence, which largely comes in the form of DWP reviews into deaths of claimants.
Now it has been brought together as part of the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing Justice London. Since 2021, journalist John Pring and I have been creating a timeline – co-produced with disabled people – showing the links between welfare policy and disabled people’s deaths.
It also shows that not only is there often a delay between the introduction of a policy and the brutal impact it has on people’s lives, but that delay tactics are central to DWP’s weaponisation of time as a strategy to avoid accountability.
To make matters worse, most families of those who have died do not even know if a review has been carried out into their loved one’s death because the DWP has always argued this is private information – an argument found by an Information Rights Tribunal to be an error in law – and can’t be shared, not even with families.
The first family to see an IPR was Philippa Day’s. Philippa, known as Pip, took her own life in 2019 after her disability benefits were stopped.
In January 2021, the coroner at the inquest into Philippa’s death found 28 separate “problems” with the administration of the Personal Independent Payment (PIP) system contributed to her death – concluding these were not individual errors by DWP and its private sector contractor Capita but systemic flaws.
Pip’s sister Imogen told us, in an interview for the Deaths by Welfare podcast, that seeing the IPR “silenced my night-time questions, right before I was going to sleep… It made it incredibly clear that we as a family had done everything that we could have done, and that it was a governmental system that had let her down”.
“I really feel for families that still don’t have answers,” she said.
And Pip is not alone. It would later come to light, after a sustained (and continuing) Freedom of Information battle, that between 2014 and 2022, the DWP carried out approximately 220 of these reviews – formerly called peer reviews, now internal process reviews (IPRs).
After finally obtaining redacted versions of some of these, we found evidence of persistent and systemic issues across welfare policy, and evidence that welfare policy is life-threatening. The reviews also contained hundreds of recommendations, which the DWP has admitted having no system for tracking.
What makes DWP reviews into what it calls the ‘death of a customer’ important is that they are (supposedly) tools through which the DWP investigates the harms of its own policies. And yet, they are designed and carried out in a way that systemically hides any state accountability. And delays in releasing the reviews is another way the department can avoid being held accountable.
What we have discovered has been learnt slowly, largely through a mixture of FOIs, parliamentary questions, queries to the DWP press office and documents released through court cases or inquests. Many of the FOIs have been submitted by Disability News Service over the last nine years.
An investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO) on the information the DWP holds on benefit claimants who ended their lives by suicide, found the DWP does not identify patterns between people’s deaths, meaning that “systemic issues which might be brought to light through these reviews could be missed”.
The NAO also found access to the reports is restricted to the team handling them and the recommendations are not tracked or monitored, meaning the DWP “does not know whether the suggested improvements are implemented”.
These recommendations include repeated warnings that policies to assess people for out-of-work disability benefits were putting the lives of “vulnerable” claimants (likely to be mostly people with mental health conditions or learning difficulties) at risk.
Yes, the DWP’s own investigations were identifying policies as potentially life-threatening. The IPRs also showed a recurring pattern of staff failure to follow DWP’s suicide guidance, which was introduced in 2009.
Tactics used to delay the release of information include claims by the DWP that the time required to collect data, due to lack of centralised record-keeping, was too costly and not in the public interest.
This was used under Thérèse Coffey to block requests about how many inquests relating to benefits claimants who died by suicide her department had submitted evidence to, as well as requests to find out how many inquests had ruled DWP policies were partly responsible for the deceased person’s state of mind. In both of these cases, the information wasn’t shared due to “disproportionate cost”.
These reviews should be publicly available by default, and the DWP should be held publicly accountable to making the changes required.
Yet it may be that the IPR process is by design unable to apprehend government accountability in people’s deaths. IPR findings and recommendations come from within the system that kills people, and therefore may never be enough for full accountability or justice. While some ascribe people’s deaths to flaws in a system that needs reform, others see them as endemic to a system that needs dismantling and creating anew, with disabled people, and the analysis developed through lived experience, at the core.
