Around the turn of the year, the Conservative government tried to push through immense and unprecedented powers for financial surveillance. If successful, it would have forced banks to sift through the public’s bank accounts, using secret algorithmic criteria to search for ‘indicators’ of welfare fraud and error. In other words, it was a sweeping, suspicionless fishing expedition. It was a proposal for a financial snoopers’ charter – one that would have come at the expense of the privacy and dignity of millions of people relying on the social security system.
For many, it felt like Big Brother was moving into their wallets. Under the proposals, if a person’s account was flagged, banks would have to report them to DWP. When automated systems fail or make mistakes – which is a statistical inevitability – innocent people living on the poverty line are the first to feel the effects.
Given the DWP’s well-documented history of negligence, there was a real fear that the bank accounts of people who had done nothing wrong could be flagged as fraudulent, triggering burdensome investigations and appeals processes, and even the wrongful suspension of benefits.
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Outreach from civil society organisations representing those groups who would have been affected spread to parliamentarians and then to the public. The bill in which these bank spying powers were nestled became so toxic that when parliament entered what is known as the wash-up, following the announcement of the summer’s general election, the legislation became too controversial for the government to ram through.
This was a huge victory for privacy and civil liberties more broadly. But despite Starmer taking to No 10 with promises of “change”, his new administration wasted little time in announcing new plans to allow officials to access bank accounts – plans that alarmingly resemble the Conservatives’ proposals that Starmer’s Labour had resisted in opposition just months before. It is difficult to see how these powers will be anything other than a regurgitated financial snooper’s charter – spying on all of us, but targeting automated suspicion of disabled people, carers, and some of Britain’s poorest.
Tackling fraud is a legitimate and necessary objective. However, the government cannot sacrifice the financial privacy of welfare claimants in its feverish desperation to look tough on fraud. In doing so, Labour risks prioritising an authoritarian image over the lives of real people – people it should be supporting.
