Keir Starmer Wants To Spy On Your Bank Account

Yesterday, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to "stop benefit fraud" in a keynote speech at the annual Labour Conference. The announcement was accompanied by a press release outlining a Fraud, Error and Debt Bill proposed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which would enable "new laws to be introduced to crack down on fraud".

The laws intend to "give DWP more powers to catch fraudsters faster and prevent customers from getting into debt sooner".

According to the press release, "the Bill is expected to save £1.6 billion over the next five years and will extend and modernise DWP’s powers to stop fraud in its tracks, recover money lost to fraud and protect vulnerable customers from racking up debt".

The press release states that "Fraud and error in the social security system currently costs the taxpayer almost £10 billion a year and since the pandemic a total of £35 billion of taxpayers’ money has been taken away from those who need it most".

According to DWP, "the nature of fraud has [...] become more sophisticated, meaning without new legal powers, DWP cannot properly keep pace with the changing nature of fraud to tackle it robustly enough".

The new laws would give DWP "new powers of search and seizure", "allow DWP to recover debts from individuals who can pay money back but have avoided doing so, bringing greater fairness to debt recoveries," and "require banks and financial institutions to share data that may show indications of potential benefit overpayments ." 

The UK digital rights group Big Brother Watch sees a revival in recently struck down bank spying powers introduced by the previous government, which aimed to enable large scale data sharing between DWP and banks via the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill.

According to Big Brother Watch Director Silkie Carlo, the Fraud, Error and Debt Bill promises to recover "*exactly the same figure* cited by the Tories". Citing a recent impact assessment on third party data gathering led by DWP, Carlo notes that "this unprecedented bank intrusion will recover less than 1/34th or *less than 3%* of the estimated annual loss to welfare fraud + error. It can’t be genuinely about protecting public funds."

While the press release states that "DWP will not have access to people’s bank accounts and will not share their personal information with third parties," Carlo highlights that this was "exactly what Tories said [...] because *banks* will be legally forced to scan all our accounts, find benefits recipients, then monitor them continuously - to send automated suspicion reports to Govt."

In a official response, Big Brother Watch states that "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."

Big Brother Watch notes that the bill would risk "Horizon-style injustice on a mass scale," referring to the 1999-2005 British Post Office Scandal, in which shortfalls of an accounting software saw over 900 subpostmasters convicted of theft, fraud, and false accounting.

During his keynote speech, Starmer announced the introduction of a Duty of Candour law before April to apply to public authorities and public servants, including the imposing of criminal sanctions, to foster transparency. Starmer described the law as a law for "the subpostmasters and the Horizon scandal [...] and all the countless injustices over the years suffered by working people".

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