What is the point of giving the Government more access to people’s bank accounts? Ministers this week announced they want powers to access the banking data of potential benefits frauds, as well as the ability to take money directly from those accounts and ban persistent cheats from driving. It’s all part of the “biggest fraud crackdown in a generation”, which is supposed to save the Work and Pensions department £1.5 billion over the next five years.
Even though that sum makes up roughly 0.1 per cent of the annual benefits bill, £1.5bn is still a lot of money by anyone’s measure. Benefits fraud is also tied up in voters’ wider perceptions of the system not working properly: most of the people they see and resent for being “benefits cheats” are entitled to the money they receive, even if they are the symptom of a broken system that isn’t doing enough to help people back into jobs that they can hold down, or to treat and prevent long-term health problems. So tackling benefit fraud is often political shorthand for taking the overall benefits bill seriously.
That shorthand is all the more important when there is a growing sense of resentment within government – never mind outside it – towards those ministers tasked with bringing the benefits bill down. The Treasury and Downing Street are reportedly frustrated that Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall isn’t coming up with the hard-hitting reforms they want to show the public they are serious about benefits, and to cut the ballooning welfare bill.
This frustration is, by the way, rather ironic given the Labour Party itself has been such a block to any serious talk of benefits reform, even in opposition. The benefits bill does need to be cut, just as the state needs to take its responsibility towards people with long-term health conditions far more seriously.
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Read MoreThe problem with policies that are really political shorthand or symbols is that they might not make that much sense beyond being used as a device. The banks themselves have been warning through their industry body UK Finance that the new powers could put them in breach of their existing obligations to protect financially vulnerable customers, which includes benefit claimants.
Those warnings have been doing the rounds for a while, as this new level of snooping isn’t a Labour brainwave, but the resurrection of something the Conservatives had planned to do before they called an election last year. Similarly, the charity Age UK joined forces with campaign group Big Brother Watch in September to say the plans represented “mass financial surveillance powers”.
What’s the risk here? If someone is persistently refusing to pay back money they should never have received, why can’t the Government use a blunt instrument to recover it? The problem is that we don’t yet know how ministers will protect claimants against mistakes or overuse of these new powers. They insist that there will be safeguards and independent oversight “to ensure the powers are used proportionately and safely”, but haven’t fully set out what those will be.
When the state makes itself more powerful, even for just a relatively small number of cases in relation to the huge wider benefits bill, it risks damaging the lives of perfectly innocent but vulnerable citizens. We have just seen from explosive scandals like the Post Office Horizon case that systems everyone insists have all the safeguards and oversight they need can go wildly off-piste.
We should have no more trust in the reliability of a computer or indeed an AI-driven benefits oversight system (something Keir Starmer has said he wants) than in any other computer system – even though the basis of many of the Post Office convictions was the erroneous belief that software cannot possibly make errors.
The state regularly makes mistakes and also befuddles perfectly decent and well-meaning people with its reams of paperwork and layers of complexity. Anyone who has witnessed an MP’s constituency surgery knows that the more the state gets involved in someone’s life, the higher the risk of that life being upended by a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
Whether it is child support, special educational needs or immigration, the more state involvement, the bigger the bag of confusing papers that someone will cart with them into a meeting with an MP – and the longer it will take even the MP and their team of experienced constituency staff to work out what on earth has happened.
The risks of messing up and allowing the state to intrude – and make more mistakes as it does – are much higher than the rewards of cutting a tiny proportion of money that amounts to little more than tough-sounding headlines. There is very little reason to trust big systems, and policies should be made on that basis, rather than because a government needs a symbol of its wider resolve on cutting benefits.
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