We don't talk about benefits, no, no*
It appears that there’s a growing culture of secrecy at DWP, while they simultaneously gain new powers and tools to use more data about and surveillance on claimants.
At the latest count there are now five research reports the department has refused to release, covering critical topics including sanctions, disabled claimants and the benefit cap, and there is a significant lack of transparency about how their automated decision-making systems and algorithms work.
The evidence for the effectiveness of benefit sanctions, where a claimant’s payments are cut or halted for infringement of often harsh rules, is dubious at best. Academic studies have found they do more harm than good, and the National Audit Office identified that not only do sanctions risk pushing people into poorly paid work and potentially economic inactivity, they also appear to spend more than they save through the application and monitoring of conditionality.
The DWP commissioned research to evaluate the effects of sanctions on work entry and wages, and was set to publish it in 2019. The report never appeared.
A study into the impact of sanctions on health, including suicide risk, was halted when the department blocked researchers’ access to the data.
As more people are moved from ‘legacy’ benefits (such as housing benefit and income support) to Universal Credit, some are forecast to lose income. A small scale trial has been carried out into so-called ‘managed migration’, but DWP is refusing to release any information on the trial’s impacts, so it’s impossible to know how it affected claimants, and therefore what the wider implications are of further managed migration.
One unreleased report was forced into the open by the Work and Pensions Select Committee, when again the DWP tried to keep it from public scrutiny. The report looked at the impact of disability benefits on those receiving them, and found many were unable to afford the most basic costs of living. Officially, it was kept secret to ‘protect the private space’ that ministers develop policy within, but it’s not hard to see why they might not want such damaging findings to be made public.
This secrecy doesn’t just include research reports. It also extends to how the benefits system works, including fraud investigations, as I described in this story earlier this year. A total lack of transparency around how the fraud algorithm works leaves claimants completely in the dark and unable to understand or challenge decisions, and disabled people believe it is disproportionately targeting them.
Meanwhile, DWP are gaining new powers to request more data about claimants through mass bank requests, which will be part of plans that could see people arrested. They will be able to request data on people with a ‘signal’ of potential fraud (what this consists of is unclear) far more easily than they do currently.
They are also trialling a new algorithm to detect fraud and potentially stop payments before someone receives any payments at all. This will be based on ‘historical cases’ but what this means in practice is unclear, and how it might impact on different types of claimants is impossible to tell. If historical fraud investigations have targeted certain groups disproportionately, as appears might be the case, any algorithm trained on that data will reproduce those biases.
The DWP is extremely tight-lipped about explaining how its automated decision-making systems work, refusing Freedom of Information requests, or how they affect claimants, by not publishing impact assessments.
This extreme imbalance of information reinforces the power imbalances at the heart of our benefits system. Claimants are surveilled and forced to adhere to the department’s behavioural standards while being denied basic information about how decisions are made, and critical evidence on fundamental tenets of the system is suppressed.
*with apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda