DWP surveillance of benefit claimants will lead to abuse, it’s claimed
DWP surveillance of benefit claimants will lead to abuse, it’s claimed – and This Site has serious concerns about Keir Starmer’s plan for the Department for Work and Pensions to spy on benefit claimants’ bank accounts.
Starmer seems to think it is not enough for the DWP to be able to request details of a bank account holder’s transactions if there are reasonable grounds to suspect them of fraud.
His attitude is that the DWP should constantly monitor claimants’ accounts, whether there is good reason to do so or not.
This would – of course – violate claimants’ human right to privacy, as laid down in the European Convention on Human rights and UK legislation.
As Rick Burgess of Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People said (quoted by Disability News Service),
“Just because you receive a benefit from the DWP does not mean you should have fewer rights; our financial affairs should not be spied upon by the DWP.
“The DWP should not get greater powers, as this department has already shown it does not exercise its existing powers humanely, transparently, or honestly.
“This is a recipe for more abuse and potential miscarriages of justice that would make the Post Office Horizon scandal look tiny in comparison.”
Caroline Collier, from Inclusion Barnet’s Campaign for Disability Justice, said,
“It is inevitable that automated surveillance will throw up erroneous overpayment or fraud alerts, causing possibly lengthy benefit suspension while things are sorted out, with all the associated hardship, debt and stress that entails.
“It also disregards people’s basic right to privacy, which should be respected unless there are reasonable grounds to think that an offence has been committed.”
The DWP itself has insisted that the new Bill will include safeguarding measures to “protect vulnerable customers”, that DWP staff would be “trained to the highest standards on the appropriate use of any new powers”, while there would be “oversight and reporting mechanisms, to monitor these new powers” and the department will not have access to people’s bank accounts and will not share their personal information with third parties.
Nobody in their right mind would believe that, though.
Bear in mind that it is believed the Bill will be based in part on a DWP policy paper released in May – Fighting Fraud in the Welfare System: Going Further – which led to the department facing questions over why it ignored concerns raised by a coroner about a disabled woman who died following a “targeted” review of her Universal Credit claim.
There is also a question of proportionality and fairness.
DWP fraud is far less serious than tax evasion and avoidance by the super-rich – the former costs the Treasury a tiny fraction of what the latter costs. But Starmer has no plans to intrude on the bank accounts of the rich, to discover which of them is lying on their tax returns. Why not?
Is it because it has always been easier to brutalise people who don’t have any power to fight back?
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I wonder about those who voted these greedie clowns in the toerags will kill more than their bigger cousins ain’t our MPs on benefits paid by the tax payers I’d wonder if this could be applied to them has they say it’s good for the goose