Editor’s note: With the announcement of targeted cuts to benefits related to disability by the British Labour government, the following analysis only highlights more intensely the desperate, impoverished position that vulnerable people are being placed in.
Names marked * have been changed. Collages using photography by Morgan Jennings.
MARCH 2025: At the time of writing, the UK’s House of Commons is weighing the right to privacy of millions. If passed as proposed the Fraud, Error and Recovery Bill will not only allow the surveillance of UK bank accounts by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), but also the extraction and freezing of assets held in those accounts without trial. Outside of its financial implications the bill will grant the DWP the power to search benefit claimant’s homes, seizing their belongings as evidence.
The law will impact anyone in receipt of a state benefit, including the state pension. It permits the surveillance of accounts linked to benefit recipients such as those of parents, employers, partners, and landlords. According to numbers from 2023, there are over 20 million people in receipt of state benefits, in total this amounts to almost a third of the British population.
This bill is an unprecedented corrosion of our fundamental right to privacy, but it has not appeared from thin air. Rather, it marks an escalation of the culture of surveillance and interrogation faced by benefit recipients across the UK; a culture which fails to recognise those on benefits as entitled to dignity and fundamental human rights.
The Benefits Panopticon
If you are in receipt of benefits, your right to privacy is already threadbare. The DWP need only flimsy justification for suspicion of fraud to probe almost every area of a benefit claimants’ life. This surveillance can take many forms, but it is the DWP’s use of technological surveillance that has expanded its power in recent years.
Our digital footprint provides an alarming amount of information. From the data we trail in our wake the detail of our daily lives can be reconstructed. If subjected to an investigation, the DWP can access this data through companies ranging from PayPal to travel agencies, along with accessing bank statements, CCTV, and open-source information such as forum posts and social media. This is combined with humiliating interrogations and in-person surveillance, such as observation by plain clothed detectives. A person is virtually stripped naked, their life laid bare to be questioned and probed.
Such investigations can have a devastating impact on benefit claimants’ mental health, particularly for those who are already vulnerable. Jack*, whose benefits were stopped during a fraud investigation that ultimately found them innocent, told me:
“I had been homeless for 4 months beforehand and had been sofa hopping and living in hostels. I only just got a room in a shared house with the help of the council, so someone who knew my situation reported me, during the worst possible time. At the time I was worried beyond belief as I was just starting to get back on my feet.”
Losing access to benefits can have brutal consequences. In 2017 Laura Winham, who had schizophrenia, starved to death in her council flat after her benefits were stopped. Her body lay undiscovered for three and a half years. Laura’s family, who discovered her body, have said that Laura was ‘abandoned and left to die’.
Though the DWP deals with vulnerable people, it regularly takes actions that risk claimant’s mental health. The process is particularly cruel for those who claim benefits due to disability, where surveillance seeks to determine whether the person has given an accurate depiction of their disability. To be disabled and in receipt of benefits is to live with a constant awareness that you may be being watched. To live with the knowledge that at any moment your experience of disability may be judged inauthentic, opening you to benefit loss, prosecution, and public shaming.
Drew*, who has been in receipt of benefits for most of their adult life, spoke to me on this stress:
“It’s the feeling of imposter syndrome, that I could be told that I don’t need or qualify for any support – as someone who is neurodivergent, has been through severe mental health struggles, as well as domestic abuse and stalking – and there have been times when I’ve heavily relied on Universal Credit while I’m recovering, and working towards employment as well as building up my freelance work.”
Outside of the emotional impact, a fraud investigation can have significant material consequences. During investigations it is common for the DWP to freeze benefit payments putting vulnerable people at risk of homelessness, starvation, and spiralling debt. Even for those who have committed no wrong, fraud investigations are invasive, emotionally devastating, and materially dangerous. So, what exactly flags people for investigation?
Bias in the Algorithm
There are two primary reasons the DWP will decide to investigate somebody, the first is their tip line through which members of the public can report one another, the second is an algorithm which flags cases of potential fraud and error.
According to Rick Burgess, Campaigns Lead at the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, the tip line’s history is riddled with misuse:
“What’s interesting about the tip line is it produces virtually no actionable prosecutions because it’s based on basically hate. There’s been almost no prosecutions from hundreds of thousands of reports”
The algorithm is not much better. Between 2020 and 2023 two thirds of the claims their algorithm flagged as ‘high risk’ turned out to be legitimate claimants. This resulted in 200,000 people being wrongly investigated for housing fraud. The DWP admits this algorithm is biased along lines of nationality, age, disability, and marital status. Despite this, the DWP refuses to entertain ditching the algorithm, claiming that “you have to bias to catch fraudsters” and that since a human makes the final decision the bias did not present “immediate concern.” This statement is marked by its utter lack of acknowledgement of the distress that can result from a fraud investigation.
Sana Farrukh, Advocacy Officer at Privacy International, explains to me:
“One of the biggest problems with algorithmic decision making is that there’s just no remedy or redress when you can’t identify who has made that decision.”
This has been an issue throughout the past decade, algorithmic bias is often only recognised in internal reviews months or years after its impact. By this point significant damage has already been done to claimants’ lives. It is vanishingly rare that any recompense is paid the victims of these errors.
This abuse is permitted due to a carefully built narrative concerning benefits and those who receive them. A narrative that allows the British public, government, and media to justify inhumane action.
The Tabloid Press
The grainy photos are never flattering. An elderly woman with bleached hair hunched over a shopping cart. A young woman, face pinched, arms laden with plastic bags. The photos fit a tradition that reaches back to the poverty porn of 2000s daytime TV. They depict the stereotype of the ‘benefit scrounger’: greed driven, mean, undeserving, grotesque. These scroungers have become a favourite scapegoat, a place to direct the exhaustion and outrage of the British public.
The surveillance of benefit recipients does not simply owe its continued existence to this narrative but is itself a means of bolstering it. The relationship between the DWP and the tabloid press is symbiotic. The press is gifted prepackaged tales of fraud and deceit guaranteed to rile their readers, and through this the DWP brands itself as tough on fraud whilst reinforcing the narrative that permits its surveillance and abuse.
Whilst it is currently developing new guidelines, until March 2024 the DWP actively advised its employees to engage the press in benefit fraud cases. Karla Prudencio, Programme Director at Privacy International, tells me:
“We see that they used to have these specific requirements for when you’re researching a case. When you have some initial findings, you need to go to a journalist and say ‘This is happening'”
There is no suggestion that the new guidelines will treat benefit recipients with greater dignity. The DWP has continued to engage the tabloid press in the interim. Karla continues:
“We can see the DWP department is always trying to build a narrative around cracking fraud, people in this narrative are treated as criminals by default. They just don’t see them (beneficiaries) as rights holders.”
The impact on public opinion of benefit recipients and disabled people has been catastrophic. Rick explains to me:
“I mean, statistically, we’ve had nothing but a rise in hate crimes. If you look at the hate crime graph for the last 10 years, it just goes straight up. So, it has that effect.
I think that in a way, it’s now so all pervasive that virtually everyone on benefits has already internally changed their behaviour because they know that there’s a hostile atmosphere in society. That’s the sort of victory of this propaganda, to make that cultural change.”
Jack’s experience aligns with this:
“I feel guilty now whenever I take on work (I’m allowed 16 hours a week) or do any kind of fun activity or exercise for fear it would be deemed outside of what is expected of a man with my health conditions, so I tend to hold back and live a more sedate, isolated life out of fear.”
The surveillance carried out by the DWP can function as it does due to this entrenched culture of demonisation, articles implying that benefit fraud is far more prevalent than it actually is. By framing benefit recipients as inherently untrustworthy, surveillance of their private lives is justified, and as they are demonised in the dominant cultural narrative the stripping of their rights becomes ever easier. It’s this narrative, this culture, that sets the stage for the Fraud, Error, and Recovery bill.
The Fraud, Error, and Recovery Bill.
The Fraud Error and Recovery Bill does not treat benefit claimants as people who are entitled to support from the state, but as inherently criminal. The bill will usher an era of mass surveillance on the basis of presumed guilt. Positioning claimants as second-class citizens, undeserving of the presumption of innocence and protection of assets allowed to non-claimants, the bill entrenches benefit claimants as an underclass of British society.
By placing people formally associated with benefit claimants at risk of surveillance the bill risks limiting claimants’ options for housing, employment and personal relationships, increasing their dependence on state support even as it demonises them for their need.
The situation is already bad, Rick explains, the bill threatens to make it worse:
“If you’re on benefits, you’re demoted to something else, an underclass. I mean that quite literally, even though they can’t explicitly say it, we know that most landlords will not rent to people on benefits, so you can’t get housing, you know?”
When I ask Drew how this might impact their life:
“I think it would take away a lot of privacy – and the choice to reveal or hide from certain people the fact that I’ve been on benefits. It comes with a lot of stigma and shame, and being forced to tell employers, relatives etc. my financial situation would be quite humiliating.”
The powers go further. Granting the right to freeze or withdraw assets from claimants’ accounts without trial. Karla explains:
“If the DWP can prove that they, for example, have made an overpayment to x person in error, then they can freeze their assets or collect the debt directly, without necessarily going to the court or through a process in which the person can challenge what the DWP are saying.”
The bill will also allow DWP agents to take on powers previously exclusive to the police. Powers that will allow them to forcibly enter benefit recipient’s homes and confiscate their possessions to be processed as evidence.
The implications are disturbing, a department that has consistently failed the people relying on it to survive gifted almost complete financial control and powers of seizure.
Perhaps one of the most terrifying aspects of this is that a person could face these consequences as the result of an algorithmic error. In order to monitor millions of bank accounts the DWP will yet again need to use AI, despite its history of bias and error.
Speaking on the issue Karla warns:
“They (DWP employees) often just do not have enough incentive to override what the algorithm is suggesting. So, you then have another bias, which is called automation bias. It’s like, okay, if the algorithm says so then yes, yes, yes.”
A Slippery Slope.
The bill represents a corrosion of the fundamental rights of benefit recipients. The right to privacy, the right to fair process, the right to redress. By expanding police powers to DWP agents, it increases their ability to abuse and traumatise vulnerable people.
Rick explains:
“What’s happening is more agents of the state are gaining greater powers to enact state violence. So, you’re seeing an expansion of the state’s monopoly on violence to greater numbers of state agents in its broadest terms.”
The consequences of these powers are hard to predict, but given the DWP’s history they are not hard to imagine.
Meanwhile, the right to privacy is a terribly easy right to lose. Unlike other fundamental rights its loss does not necessarily register as an immediate harm. It is only later that we begin to see its consequences. When the right to privacy is stripped it leaves people open to intimidation, humiliation, and persecution, it removes one of the few barriers that stand between us and the wrongs our government can commit.
Karla tells me:
“What we have seen is that privacy is related to a lot of different rights. It’s not only privacy itself, you need that private life, or private space, to express yourself, your political opinions, your religion.”
From banking data, it is often possible to reveal a person’s political persuasion, religious beliefs, and lifestyle choices. It throws into peril the right to control who has access to sensitive details of people’s life and identity.
Rick warns:
“Sometimes the slippery slope argument is misused, but on this, it’s absolutely correct to use it.”
If these powers come into effect bias in an algorithm digitally monitoring a person could result in them losing money, access to their bank account, and having their home invaded and possessions seized. If the person is innocent, and survives the investigation, it is unlikely compensation will be accessible.
The bill has been justified through appeals to the money lost to DWP error and benefit fraud annually, but the validity of this argument is questionable.
Sana’s response to this justification is that the DWP has estimated that only 2% of this money will be recovered as a result of the surveillance allowed by the bill, stating that:
“It’s an extremely disproportionate response, especially considering the harm that something like this will do.”
The Human Cost
When Errol Graham did not respond to letters from the DWP his benefits were cut. Eight months later he was found dead in his flat. He weighed only four and a half stone; he had starved to death. Despite extensive knowledge of his severe mental health issues, rather than take his lack of response as a flag that his condition may have deteriorated, the DWP saw in it simply an easy excuse to cut off one more claimant.
When I ask how devastating benefit loss can be Rick replies:
“Well, I mean, the ultimate impact is people take their own lives. Back in 2012 they did a release which showed that, at that point, within six weeks of people having their benefits stopped the rate of death was four people a week, and then they stop releasing those figures.”
Since 2012 things have only worsened for benefit claimants, it is hard to image that the rate of deaths per week will have gone down during the past decade.
Errol Graham is not alone. In 2016 Clive Johnson, a man with physical and mental health issues, committed suicide after being accused of benefit fraud twice within six-months due to administrative errors. His suicide note referenced his fear of the DWP. At the coroner’s inquest his sister identified the first letter accusing him of fraud as the trigger that caused the deterioration of Clive Johnson’s mental health. Writing after the inquest she told of how, prior to the accusation of fraud, Mr. Johnson had finally reached a more positive place after years of struggle. He had a brilliant “zest for life” she writes.
Redress is rare, Rick explains:
“The coroner system is not there to investigate crimes. It’s there to establish a set of facts. It’s very, very resistant to blaming government policy or a government department, even when we’ve had suicide notes written on DWP letters. So, there is a structural way that our system excuses state violence. We call it the slow violence of the system.”
The Disability News Service recently forced the DWP to publish a series of Internal Process Reviews (IPRs) conducted in the wake of the deaths of benefit recipients during the 2010s. The IPRs revealed that the DWP had failed its own legislative guidelines in many of the cases, putting vulnerable people at risk.
Rick Says:
“We know they’ve (the DWP) destroyed reports. We know they’ve destroyed evidence.“
Over and over, successive governments and their departments have failed to recognise the vulnerability of the people with which it communicates, pushing people already on a ledge.
If the Fraud Error and Recovery Bill comes into effect more people will face unjustified interrogation, more people will be stripped of their benefits due to DWP error, and people will find their bank accounts frozen or depleted without trial. If this bill is passed there will be a human cost, a cost measured in the bodies of people the UK has deemed disposable
