Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Eighth sitting)

Siân Berry Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 6th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Steve Darling]

I will press both my amendments to a vote.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I will press mine too.

[Rebecca Smith]

As we have just heard, clause 74 amends the Social Security Administration Act to give power to the Secretary of State to obtain information for the purposes of identifying incorrect payments of certain benefits. I think that is fairly self-explanatory, so I do not have any questions.

Schedule 3 provides further detail on eligibility verification measures, but what happens when people have an account with a bank or financial institution other than the one that DWP payments are made into? We talk a lot about linked bank accounts, but it is implied that one bank will be looking to see whether a person has multiple accounts. However, people have much more complicated lives.

How does the Minister intend to ensure that we not only look at the account into which the benefit is paid, so that the investigation is more thorough? Thinking specifically about National Savings & Investments—a Government account into which people save money—are we going to make sure that a person’s entire suite of bank accounts are included, or just the one into which the DWP pays money?

That leads me on to my amendments. As the official Opposition, we have tabled amendments 24 and 25 to schedule 3, relating to the scope of who may be subject to the legislation. I will also speak to the amendments tabled the hon. Members for Torbay and for Brighton Pavilion during my comments.

Amendment 24 would include within the scope of the Bill accounts held by a person appointed to receive benefits on behalf of another person. We have tabled that because it would mean that proxy accounts are not excluded and wider patterns of potential organised fraud could be monitored and prevented over time. Without that measure, we believe that it would be easy for fraudsters to deliberately evade monitoring.

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[Steve Darling]

We need to make sure that there is a level of proportionality. On pension credit, proportionality suggests to me that pensioners are often extremely private people, and they will fear that the Minister will be looking through their shopping bills. Although there may be reassurances, this is still the presentation of what parts of our society may see as a Big Brother state. We have concerns about the impact, and by excluding pension credit specifically through amendment 30, we would serve some of the most vulnerable people in our society in the best way we can.

[Siân Berry]

It is a pleasure to serve under you again, Sir Jeremy. I rise to speak against clause 74 and schedule 3, and to support my amendment 35, which I intend to push to a vote. I also support the two Liberal Democrat amendments, and will vote for those if they are pressed.

In short, I am opposed to clause 74 and schedule 3 standing part of the Bill, and to the related powers that apply to the eligibility verification process. These powers do nothing less than bring in a system of disproportionate, mass financial surveillance of millions of people who have done nothing wrong and are not suspected of any wrongdoing. It is of profound concern that these powers are likely to be used at scale to monitor the private bank accounts of people who need the support of society and have done absolutely nothing to arouse suspicion.

One of the changes that people wanted to see when they voted out the last Government was a welfare system that treats people with dignity and respect. Sadly and disappointingly, these parts of the Bill are based instead on blame and suspicion of people in need of help, when the bigger issue is unclaimed and underclaimed benefits due to a lack of awareness, complexity in the system and stigma. I asked the Minister in the evidence session whether he would be using these new powers to also help alert people who are underclaiming benefits to what they may be due. The answer was not very clear, but I think it was no, because only the possibility of overpayments and reclaiming those was discussed.

I do not want to tweak these proposals—I want to prevent these two parts of the Bill becoming law at all, because they would allow the DWP to require banks and other financial institutions to provide information about claimants of universal credit, pension credit and employment support allowance in order to interrogate their claims of eligibility and entitlement. I assume that every claim would be examined over time. That means a huge new invasion of citizens’ privacy.

Currently, if someone is out on the street, the police can only use suspicion-less stop and search on them if they have a section 60 notice in place, which involves setting out a clear reason, identifying a small area and identifying a fixed time for which that would take place. The Bill effectively puts a section 60 notice around every single person who claims these benefits. These people include, disproportionately, people from protected groups—disabled people and older people. This is a real problem; it is discriminatory, unsettling and unfair.

On the numbers, around 7 million people receive universal credit, around 1.4 million pensioners receive pension credit, and around 1.5 million get help from employment support allowance. These powers will drag nearly 10 million people directly into a net of intrusive financial surveillance, as well as those appointed to receive benefits on their behalf, including parents, carers, appointed people and landlords. Given that several of these benefits have eligibility requirements based on household income, we are bringing in family members as well. Unsurprisingly, these measures are of huge concern to disability rights, poverty, pension and privacy groups, who are united in their opposition to them.

Ideally, I want to see everything struck out, but amendment 35 to schedule 3 would at least mean that more benefits could not be added to the list of relevant benefits by regulations. It would leave in place the ability for Ministers to remove benefits through regulations in future.

The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, set out on Second Reading the risk of damaging trust in and engagement with the DWP for millions of people who might otherwise not claim benefits. I raise that problem because I believe that underclaiming is as much of a problem as fraud and error and should be getting as much attention.

On proportionality, it is incumbent on Ministers to come up with a new, more proportionate way to address fraud, where there is reasonable suspicion. I am not against the issue being looked at, but I add that administrative errors are 8% of the problem. They are caused by the DWP’s mistakes and should not result in a need to treat as suspects people who might make errors in their claims due to lack of clarity in or awareness of requirements.

It is absolutely right that fraudulent uses of public money are dealt with robustly. To that end, the Government already have significant powers to review the bank statements of welfare fraud suspects. Ministers did not hear me complaining at the new powers to require more information when there is a reasonable suspicion of somebody having committed fraud. This eligibility requirement goes way, way beyond.

There are automated decision-making powers coming through in another Bill, which impacts on this Bill and the assurances we have received from Ministers. They say that no automated decisions will be made based on the eligibility verification data alone and that, where potential fraud is identified against those eligibility indicators, cases will be referred to the DWP for further consideration and investigation. However, assurances by the DWP that a human will always be involved in the decision whether to investigate an individual are not set out in the legislation, and the scale and nature of any human input is very unclear, despite its having been promised.

Furthermore, as we heard in oral evidence, while assurances about human involvement are also provided for under current data protection law, the Data (Use and Access) Bill currently making its way through Parliament will remove any proper prohibitions on automated decision making. Those must be included in this legislation, in the code of practice or in the regulations. I believe it is for the Government to produce urgent amendments to solve the problem.

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[Damien Egan (Bristol North East) (Lab)]

I want to make a few points, because I am worried that some Members are underestimating the level of fraud and the direction of travel, because it is only going up.

The hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion is correct in a sense in saying that people voted for change and that fairness in the welfare system is one of the things they voted for, but part of that is about having confidence in the welfare system. People can see the level of fraud, and they want the Government to restore the balance so that it is less in favour of people committing fraud.

I encourage those Members who are apprehensive about these elements to visit their local jobcentre. I did two visits at my local jobcentre in Kingswood; I had to go back because the work coaches had so many stories to tell. Members of the Work and Pensions Committee will have heard me say this before, but I spoke to two women: one had been there for 45 years and the other 41 years. They said the level of fraud is something that they have never seen before. I wish they were here now, because everything that they said about how we deal with it was about getting information from banks and other agencies and sharing that information on eligibility and combating fraud. I wanted to make those points and I encourage Members to speak to them.

[Siân Berry]

Does the hon. Member recall me talking about clause 72 and not speaking up about speeding up the electronic getting of information from banks when people are under suspicion? Does he agree that there is a barrier at that point?

[Damien Egan]

I really appreciate the point, but I think if hon. Members were to spend time and speak to work coaches—as they may have done—they would find that work coaches want, and are asking for, more of that information to be shared. It is also about trying to prevent people from committing fraud.

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It is for that reason that I struggle with the suggestion that, as the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion said, to act in a preventive manner with the eligibility verification power is to be discriminatory towards disabled people. I fundamentally reject the idea that that is directly discriminatory in any way. I can understand why, looking at the cohort, some may feel that there is indirect discrimination, but it is important to remember that we would face similar charges whatever we did in the prevent space, rather than the detect space, because there is an over-representation of people from specific vulnerable groups in the benefit claimant cohort. That is just a fact. It means that anything we do in that space would be unacceptable. Given the level of fraud and error that we have, it is difficult to say that we should ignore £9.7 billion a year.

[Siân Berry]

I hope the Minister will not take this the wrong way, but I hope that he is able to understand that the stigma that people feel about applying for benefits is partly to do with the attitudes people have towards those who receive benefits. The idea of the Government applying a privacy invasion measure against that cohort of people as a whole feels like discrimination to them. It adds to the stigma; it speaks to the fact that they feel that they are not treated as well as other people in society. They are not believed when they say that they do not have £16,000. Those are all parts of the same package of discrimination, are they not?

[Andrew Western]

They would be, were the powers entirely unique. However, as we heard in the evidence of the representative from HMRC, there is a long-standing power—introduced, I believe, in the Finance Act 2011—for HMRC to routinely and regularly check all interest-bearing bank accounts in the country. I have not looked at the cohort of people who are fortunate enough to have interest-bearing bank accounts, nor have I ever been in such a position myself, so I plead ignorance here. However, I suspect that there is not the same over-representation of vulnerable groups.

The important point—this comes back to the broader point around automated decision making, AI and so on that the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion made—is that we are looking to better improve our access to data, not take decisions as a direct result of the information we have received. Indeed, we have built in human decision making at every stage of the five areas where we are taking new or updated powers on the DWP side of the Bill.