IF KEIR STARMER were serious about treating people who receive social security payments with “dignity and respect,” he would not have announced his crackdown in the Mail on Sunday, or used it to rail against “criminals” who “game the system.”
The government’s estimate of the cost of fraud and error in the benefits system last year was £9.7 billion. Social security experts Policy in Practice estimate that £23bn goes unclaimed every year in payments people are entitled to.
So all Starmer’s sound and fury against benefit cheats is unlikely to make a significant dent in the welfare budget — even with dangerous new powers for the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) to remove money directly from people’s bank accounts without a court order.
These powers themselves, which Starmer boasts about to Mail readers, have prompted alarm from privacy campaigners, who wrote to DWP chief Liz Kendall in September warning they resurrect obligations on banks to conduct mass surveillance of individuals’ bank accounts on a “guilty until proven innocent” model first proposed by the Tories.
Given concerns over the department’s use of machine-learning algorithms to flag suspicious behaviour, groups including Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Disabled People Against Cuts fear a Horizon-style scandal in the welfare system, with innocent people branded criminals and robbed of their money due to system error.
The presumption of guilt is built into the successive wars on “benefit cheats.” It grossly exaggerates the scale of benefit fraud, feeding hostility to the social security system itself. It encourages suspicion of anyone claiming, and was certainly linked to the steady rise in hate crimes against disabled people recorded over 14 years of Tory government.
The assault on disabled and chronically ill people was among the cruellest policies of those governments.
Whistleblowers exposed jobcentre staff being handed targets to cut the number of people receiving payments. “Fit for work” tests were slammed by medical professionals for setting claimants up to fail.
The DWP admitted in 2015 that thousands of people passed as “fit for work” died within months; there were even cases where people starved to death after their benefits were cut, like Errol Graham, whose body was only discovered by the bailiffs sent to evict him.
Labour should be rejecting a Tory inheritance that persecutes some of Britain’s most vulnerable.
But it shows little sign of doing so, with Rachel Reeves pledging to continue Tory amendments to the work capability assessment that narrow eligibility criteria and are likely to cost disabled people hundreds of pounds a month.
Statistics do show the cost of social security has increased dramatically since the Covid pandemic.
But the reasons this might be the case are obvious: long Covid itself, unacceptable treatment waits on an under-resourced NHS leading to worsening health conditions, and poorer health overall as a result of rising poverty — not only is life expectancy in Britain falling, but people are spending more of their lives in poor health, according to the King’s Fund.
The biggest increase in payments relates to mental health conditions. Kendall herself has, in more honest moments, admitted that Britain is getting sicker: and addressing the rise in mental ill health is likely to require greater investment in treating it as well as a more comprehensive investigation into the causes.
These are likely to include poor job and housing security and sexual objectification of women and girls driving up rates of sexual harassment and abuse. The impact of bullying cultures on social media, particularly on the young, may well be a factor.
Worsening health is a huge social and economic problem in Britain. Its human consequences are tragic for millions of people.
Reversing the trend should certainly be a government priority. But cutting welfare payments and demonising those dependent on them will do nothing to address this — and continues the cruel, and sometimes lethal, hostility to the sick of Kendall’s Conservative predecessors.
