Sir Keir Starmer will today use his first Labour conference speech as prime minister—intended to calm frustrations over his premiership to date—to announce a law giving investigators access to personal bank accounts. “Just the sort of thing,” joked politics professor Tim Bale, “that’ll have already-disillusioned Labour Party delegates cheering in the aisles—not.”
Civil liberties campaigners have criticised the proposal as being akin to the previous Conservative government’s “mass bank spying plans that we defeated a couple of months ago.”
Like these measures, Starmer’s law will be introduced under the pretext of “rooting out” benefit fraudsters—those who purposefully claim state handouts they’re not entitled to. But Silkie Carlo, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, said monitoring would not be “targeted” since banks could only keep an eye on claimants by “scanning all accounts.”
Carlo added that if the law amounts to handing investigators “the same mass bank spying power [as was going to be handed over by the Tories], we will give them hell, and win again.”
Starmer will say that the measures are required to save the taxpayer £1.6 billion (€1.92bn) in overpayments over the next five years. The prime minister will tell the conference:
We will get the welfare bill down because we will tackle long-term sickness and get people back to work. We will make every penny work for you because we will root out waste and go after tax avoiders. There will be no stone left unturned.
But the ‘overpayment’ figure is, of course, a tiny fraction of the nation’s benefits bill, which hit £298.7bn (€358.7bn) in 2021-22—up from £168.7bn (€202.5bn) in 2017-18.
According to The Times, new legislation will require banks to tell the benefits system if people have savings of more than £16,000 (€19,215), the cut-off point for claiming benefits, or have been abroad for more than the four weeks allowed for universal credit claimants. Inspectors will then be able to investigate this bank information.
The plans are likely to be scrutinised by Reform UK, whose leader, Nigel Farage, was last year involved in a debanking row after his account was closed for political reasons.
