HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has frozen child benefit payments for some 23,500 families. This monumental decision is built off the back of faulty travel data fed to them by the Home Office. The family flight records provide a very clear account of how many families escaped from the UK. These records only captured people who left — not those who returned home. The controversy has led to some unprecedented, urgent calls for an independent inquiry into the data’s misuse and its wider implications.
HMRC’s enforcement drive on benefits fraud was to make sure only the families who should be getting child support were getting it. The modest program, originally intended only to connect a few dots, ballooned in size as the years went on. Critics, including Sana Farrukh from Privacy International, say that it has turned into a “textbook example of ‘function creep’.”
The issues with the Home Office data have been highlighted in an annual report by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, which noted that such data is often “incomplete, inconsistent, or simply wrong.” Unfortunately, these shortcomings are nothing new. John Vine, a former chief inspector of borders and immigration, said that the Home Office has lost the ability to keep proper records over a number of years.
“Thousands of families have had essential child benefit payments wrongly suspended because of unreliable or incomplete data,” stated Andrew Snowden, advocating for immediate government action. He called for the deep reexamination of the authorization process for this system. He stressed that trustworthy information needs to drive the priorities and policies established around families’ benefits.
Within weeks of launching the anti-fraud crackdown, thousands of parents were wrongfully flagged as having taken their children abroad. This even included those families who had already ceased to collect benefits. It included people seeking shelter from war in Ukraine and those facing barriers to hospital access. HMRC gave these families just a month’s notice to act before stopping payments, increasing the emotional turmoil they are already experiencing.
The continued reliance on Home Office data underscores major flaws in the UK’s arrival and departure recording systems. Former DOT Inspector General John Vine stressed the importance and urgency of correcting these discrepancies. It troubles me, he said, that we’ve got a $10 billion system that’s supposed to be able to record when people come back into the country or have exited the country. That should be pretty accurate. If that’s not a situation, that should be examined immediately too.
Under the UK/US TSC agreement, data sharing was meant to be used only for counter-terrorism and serious crime. That said, Snowden makes the case that this use of data to support benefit fraud checks is particularly egregious and deserves special consideration and withering criticism.