Labour has promised to crack down on benefit fraud by reintroducing “snooper’s charter” proposals mooted under the last government that would allow welfare officials to request information from claimants’ bank accounts.
A fraud, error and debt bill will require banks and other financial institutions to share data that may help identify benefit fraud as part of a package of measures designed to “catch fraudsters faster” and save £1.6bn over five years.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, announced the bill during his speech to Labour party conference on Tuesday, when he argued that legislating to stop benefit fraud was essential if the government was to “maintain support for the welfare state”.
Campaigners warned ministers against adopting any legislation based too closely on the previous government’s widely criticised data protection and digital information bill, which had similar anti-benefit fraud aspirations.
When that bill – condemned by campaigners as an invasion of privacy likely to disproportionately affect older and disabled claimants – was passing through parliament Labour opposed amendments that required banks to share their customers’ data with the department to help it tackle benefit fraud.
The government said the new bill will include enhanced measures to protect vulnerable claimants, and establish safeguards to ensure the new powers are not misused by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
The DWP said: “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.”
It added: “This legislation delivers on the government’s manifesto commitment to safeguard taxpayers’ money and demonstrates the government’s commitment to not tolerate fraud, error or waste anywhere in public services, including the social security system.”
The DWP is under pressure to tackle huge losses to benefit fraud and error, which more than doubled in cash terms since the pandemic to £9.7bn in 2023-24. It admitted it is unlikely to see fraud and error fall back to pre-2019 levels and has blamed societal trends including “a softening of attitudes regarding fraud”.
The biggest area of benefit fraud, accounting for two-thirds of the total, is in universal credit. It has been subject to large-scale fraud by criminal gangs who exploited flaws in the online benefit’s design to make multiple fraudulent applications – sometimes running into tens of millions of pounds.
The department’s own management of benefits has also come under scrutiny, with its mishandling of carer’s allowance, resulting in hundreds of millions of pounds in avoidable overpayments that landed carers with hefty debts, blamed by MPs on its own administrative failures.
Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch’s director, said: “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.
She added: “A financial snooper’s charter targeted to automate suspicion of our country’s poorest is intrusive, unjustified and risks Horizon-style injustice on a mass scale.”
Crossbench peer Beeban Kidron said she hoped the new government was not proposing to resurrect the “egregious proposals” made by the last one. She said: “If the government introduces spyware as previously proposed, I will oppose it with the ferocity that Labour colleagues in opposition did.”
Caroline Selman, a researcher for the Public Law Project charity, said the bill raised questions about whether ministers had learned lessons from the last proposal. “If they are serious about building trust in government use of technology, introducing invasive powers of surveillance with a high risk of harm is not the way to do it,” she said.
