Unlimited Surveillance

3 days after the 2024 General Election was called, the Digital Protection and Digital Information Bill failed to proceed before the Parliamentary session ended. This article is left online as a reference point for the future.

As the world continues to grapple with the revelations of unscrupulous tax evasion by global billionaires, the UK Government is gearing up to pursue the most vulnerable in society to recover overpaid benefits.

In late 2023, the EU Tax Observatory estimated that a modest 2% levy on the world’s 2,756 wealthiest billionaires could generate a staggering £250bn annually. These billionaires collectively hold an estimated wealth of $13tn.

The report poignantly highlighted the lack of serious efforts to address this issue, warning that the current situation could potentially undermine the public’s faith in existing tax systems.

However, rather than tackling this glaring inequality, the UK government is instead focusing its efforts on the less privileged. It is seeking statutory powers to conduct unlimited surveillance on bank and building society accounts linked to social security benefits and state pensions, even in the absence of any suspicion of fraud.

This move will place millions of individuals, landlords, charities, clubs, voluntary organisations, and companies under round-the-clock scrutiny. No court order will be required, and those under surveillance will not be informed about the data extracted or how it is used or misused. There will be no right to appeal.

This alarming shift towards a surveillance state is being ushered in under the guise of the misleadingly titled Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, currently at report stage in the House of Lords.

The government justifies this infringement on civil liberties as a necessary measure to prevent fraud. It argues that mass surveillance is required to combat benefit fraud, which is estimated to cost around £6.4bn annually, or 2.7% of total benefit payments. The Social Security Fraud Act 2001 currently allows the government to request information from bank accounts on a case-by-case basis if there is reasonable suspicion of fraud. This targeted approach is set to be replaced by indiscriminate mass surveillance of bank accounts.

The surveillance will extend to all bank accounts held by eligible persons. Any individual connected with the monitored account will also be subject to surveillance. This includes landlords receiving direct housing benefit payments, joint account holders, and even friends or family members into whose accounts benefits are paid. Anyone holding power of attorney over a bank account will also be monitored.

The scale of this surveillance is staggering. In 2023, some 22.6m people claimed benefits. The actual number of individuals monitored could be significantly higher, as it will include landlords, joint account holders, SMEs, charities, local clubs, and others. Given that each party under surveillance may hold multiple bank accounts, the number of accounts under surveillance could be astronomical. Banks will be required to sift through millions of transactions to provide the necessary information to the government. Artificial Intelligence will be deployed to scan these millions of transactions in search of irregularities, opening up the potential for significant errors.

These are indeed troubling times, as the state significantly expands its powers to monitor the activities of its citizens.

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