Government to require banks to do monthly checks on the accounts of people on benefits and report back

[IncompleteSenten]

I read about this here.

metro.co.uk/2023/11/06/benefits-claimants-to-have-bank-accounts-checked-monthly-in-crackdown-19779875/

Do you think they will do it or it'll be blocked?

It sounds awful. If I was on unemployment benefit I'd feel really humiliated. I understand fraud happens but bloody hell this is really not on.

For what it will cost to implement compared to benefit fraud recouped will probably be negligible as most benefit claimants live a hand to mouth existence. Just another tory ploy to satisfy the rabid right wingers.

I read this to and thought WTF

This thread will be interesting - will everyone be saying it’ll cost more to check and not worth it like when they say can’t means test WFP for pensioners as it would cost too much / be too difficult …..

What happens with things like small gifts of money for bdays/Xmas etc ?

Tbh though if it can be done who would object unless you have something to hide ?

I feel it’s an infringement of your human rights and they should only do it if they have reason to really believe your behaving fraudulently.

What do they expect to find? If anyone is fiddling the system, they are hardly going to put all the transactions through their bank account, are they?

Some people will have more than one bank account, and their benefits will only be paid into one of them. So how will banks know whose bank accounts to look at?

What about joint accounts ?

Do benefit claimants get human rights ?

That's your problem right there.

They’ll also be really confused if they check mine! I have an (empty) savings account and I move money back and forth (so that unexpected bills don’t go out) but for some reason each time I transfer it sees that as an amount into the account (for example if I only had £50 but put it back and forth 10 times in a day it would say I’ve had £500 paid in on that day) so when my app shows my monthly income it looks huge !

Think it's says more about politicians - they are the sort of people who can't understand how people need benefits but they can understand that someone might lie and cheat and steal ... hum

A DWP spokesman said: ‘We are already cracking down on those who try to exploit the welfare system in a push to save the taxpayer £1.3bn in the next year.

If this is true and they can save anything near that amount I'm all for it.

And when I claimed benefits I would've been all for it then too.

Will they be checking up known tax dodgers like Zahawi y'know just to keep an eye on them paying what their due ?

If they want to save money

I wouldn't have a problem with this, as long as they sort all of the tax dodging and wealth inequality at the top first, which as we all know costs us far more than benefit fraud. Of course, no-one in power is going to bite the hand that feeds it though.

I like the idea... but once a government has such powers, where would they stop?

This thread isn't about tax avoidance though (which also massively needs sorting out).

So sticking to the subject at hand, I think it's a good idea on the face of it.

So many rights and so much freedom in the U.K. these days...

What's to stop someone withdrawing money and spending it that way?

It's a really bad idea coming from the biggest fraudsters in the country. Ppe contracts anyone.

It's apparently similar to a 1996 pilot trialled in Hull and Medway that focused on long term claimants. About 6,500 people were 'invited' to participate in a get ready for work programme. Instead of signing on, there was 90 days of training at the Job Centre, five days a week, followed by three months of compulsory volunteering. About half the claimants stopped claiming before the trial finished. Or so I read earlier.

Sure, great idea, and why not have them come round to people's houses for a bit of a nosey, check they haven't got any nice furniture or anything they're holding onto. Surely they should sell all that before being allowed to suckle on the teat of Mother State.

I've been on benefits in the past but I don't think I'd consider this as humiliating. I think a lot of people erroneously believe the DWP already have real-time access to bank accounts already.

I'd be curious to know exactly what information is shared - I expect it would be summary data like the balance at the end of the month, rather than a full statement for every single bank account for every single person on benefits (because that would amount to huge amounts of data to store, and it would be complex to process it).

Eventually I think people will just be more careful not to put things through their accounts unnecessarily, eg those getting birthday money paid into their account would just get it in cash or on a gift card. I don't think the DWP will really care about small occasional payments anyway (ad hoc gifts are allowed) but rather looking for those with large regular payments or large bank balances.

I imagine it could perhaps catch people giving away large sums of money in order to stay under the capital thresholds but not sure how they would prove it was given away if taken out in cash. I work in benefits advice and we certainly have an awful lot of people subtely asking how to hide money !

I would imagine any extra money won't be being put in the account that benefits are paid into.

It's a shame isn't it, when attempts to demonise welfare claimants always end up highlighting the fact that if the government actually collected the fucking tax it was owned, we'd be in a much nicer country. It's almost as if some people cared about fairness, isn't it ?

Copied and pasted from today's Telegraph.... this is what they published ahead of the King's Speech tomorrow.

"Does benefit fraud really exist? Not according to some on the Left, who refuse to contemplate the possibility that some benefit-claimants might not actually be entitled to everything they are claiming. They like to quote figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) which claims that a modest 3.6 per cent of benefits were “overpaid” in the year to April – a definition which includes error as well as fraud. It might sound a reassuringly low percentage but it is still £8.3 billion, which converts to quite a lot of schools and hospitals – not to mention a few miles of high speed railway.
But it is hard to find what you are not really looking for. And in the case of benefit fraud neither this Government nor its immediate predecessors have been looking very hard. That, however, may be about to change. Under plans to be announced in the Autumn Statement, banks will be obliged to run monthly checks on the accounts of benefit claimants and alert the DWP to any behaviour which might indicate fraud is taking place – such as other sources of income or transfer of cash abroad.
According to Government sources, the move is expected to save taxpayers an estimated £500 million over five years. Why are its ambitions so modest? The last time a Conservative government seriously tried to crack down on benefit fraud it was stunned by the result. In 1996, John Major’s government began a pilot study called Project Work, in which 6,800 long-term benefit-claimants in Hull and Medway were asked to do something a little different than simply turn up at a benefits office and sign on. For three months, they underwent compulsory work training, followed by a further three months of work for voluntary organisations. The result? Of the 6,800 claimants, 3,100 chose to stop claiming rather than fulfil their obligations – either because they couldn’t be bothered to turn up or because they suddenly discovered that actually they did have a job after all. One wonders how many of the 3,100 people who stopped claiming actually existed – or even lived in Britain.
One person who was impressed by the Major government’s approach, interestingly, was Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, who wrote a piece in the Independent declaring “The Tories were right: workfare really works”. Then, of course, the Conservatives lost the election and the momentum was lost.
The experiment, though a quarter of a century old, should serve as encouragement for this or any government: don’t be frightened of scrutinise welfare payments and cracking down on those who cheat the system. On the contrary, once taxpayers see how much of their money is disappearing down a black hole of fraud, they will thank you for it. Why stop at poking into benefit-claimants’ bank accounts? Why not also repeat the Project Work experiment and oblige some claimants to turn up and do something for their money – and find out just how many people have been cheating the system?
The number claiming out of work benefits (which is vastly larger than the official unemployment figure, which is derived from the Labour Force Survey) has exploded in recent years, especially since the pandemic. It looks as if we may soon find out the true scale of fraud – and it is unlikely to be pretty."