Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the response to requests for transparency over the use of artificial intelligence to verify welfare claims.

DWP recognises the public interest in being transparent about what we do and how we process personal information. However, we have to balance this with keeping the information secure, by not revealing publicly all methods and practices used particularly to detect fraudulent claims and cyber-attack against our systems.

DWP takes its responsibility to protect data very seriously and we have published the Personal information charter (PIC) which gives details of how we use information provided to us. We have done this to be as transparent as we can without hindering our ability to detect fraud and protect data.

The PIC also explains that DWP does not use artificial intelligence to replace human judgement to determine or deny a payment to a claimant. We will only use data for lawful purposes.

The DWP annual report and accounts 2022 to 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) also makes mention of audits covering data management and artificial intelligence.