Privacy campaigners are criticizing UK proposals to force banks to share data from the accounts of government benefit claimants, saying the ploy amounts to "a financial snoopers' charter targeted to automate suspicion."
The new Labour government has decided to resurrect the idea from the previous administration via legislation which made it to the House of Lords Committee Stage before being axed ahead of the general election.
The social security system currently costs the taxpayer almost £10 billion a year, and since the pandemic, a total of £35 billion, according to the government.
The intent is to introduce a Fraud, Error and Debt Bill, which sets out to save £1.6 billion over the next five years and will extend and modernize the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) powers to "stop fraud in its tracks."
The bill is also expected to recover money lost to fraud and protect vulnerable claimants from racking up debt, DWP said.
Included are provisions that would ensure banks and other financial institutions share data which the government says could identify benefit fraud. However, the bill also has measures for overseeing how these powers are employed.
"We will also bring forward a Code of Practice which will be consulted on during the passage of the bill to provide further assurance on the safe use of the powers," the DWP said.
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There would also be safeguarding measures to protect vulnerable benefits claimants. "Staff will be trained to the highest standards on the appropriate use of any new powers, and we will introduce new oversight and reporting mechanisms to monitor these new powers. DWP will not have access to people's bank accounts and will not share their personal information with third parties," the department added in a statement.
However, privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch slammed the new powers. Director Silkie Carlo said: "Starmer's benefits bank spying proposals sound alarmingly similar to the powers Labour fought just a few months ago in opposition. Everyone wants fraud to be dealt with, and the government already has strong powers to investigate the bank statements of suspects.
"But to force banks to constantly spy on benefits recipients without suspicion means that not only millions of disabled people, pensioners, and carers will be actively spied on but the whole population's bank accounts are likely to be monitored for no good reason."
Carlo said a "financial snoopers' charter" designed to automate suspicion of the UK's poorest people was intrusive, unjustified, and risks the kind of injustice seen during the Post Office Horizon scandal.
"This is yet another insult to pensioners, an attack on Britain's poorest people, and an assault on the presumption of innocence," she said. ®