Starmer faces Labour revolt over plan to raid bank accounts of benefit claimants | Welfare
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/25/starmer-faces-labour-revolt-over-plan-to-raid-bank-accounts-of-benefit-claimants
Posted by Aggressive_Plates
27 Comments
Regardless of your opinion on this, this is the latest in a series of Labour decisions that they’d be decrying from the rooftops if it were implemented by the nasty Tories
With the full support of a party pruned of all talent, nothing Starmer will do can change his bleak personality and lack of vision.
You dont get enough to live on so its gonna be a pretty shit raid
I’ve seen few principled MPs revolt in the commons ever, 99% of them only give a fk about themselves.
It is adorable that anyone still calls them the Labour Party. They are nasty party in red ties, it’s that simple.
If any Labour MP wants to be taken seriously after this term they should probably just quit now.
As a left-wing party or even left of centre party, they’re on a fast track to be coming as relevant as the Lib Dems. By which I mean “utterly irrevant”
If you don’t know what the Lib Dems did, please read up on their history before you vote for them
I would *love* to hang out with Starmer for like an hour and just see what his deal is. He clearly isn’t a Corbyn who actually wants to help people. Doesn’t seem to be a Trump/Farage type who just wants people chanting his name. Doesn’t seem to have the Obama/Blair style messiah complex. Too flip-flop to seem to genuinely believe in any principles or political goals. Why did he want to be Prime Minister?
>He writes that the legislation “would compel banks to carry out financial surveillance of welfare recipients”, adding that “given the volume of accounts involved, this will be completed by an algorithm”.
Governed by AI, what could go wrong?
I share a bank with my dad where both of our benefits go in, his disability and my carers benefits. Technically this would flag up because his benefits far outweigh mine and it would show a lump sum going in thats not my money.
If there are errors and overpayments due to their own shit systems why should the claimant be punished, maybe they could… I dunno…. fix the system so it doesn’t mess up?
Do the people on here read the article before getting outraged? This is going to target people who are fraudulently claiming benefits, have the means to pay the money back, and are refusing to do so. Or do people on here think that benefit cheats should be keeping the money they’ve obtained fraudulently?
Hasn’t he accidentally hit upon a way to flag instances of tax avoidance?
But of course he won’t explore that idea further because he’s only interested in giving the poor a kicking and not the rich.
Easy money, etc.
Hopefully the working class give him a fucking good kicking at the next polls. Get the evil pie faced cunt out.
The Labour party. Fucking those who need help the most even harder than the Conservatives did. Just when you think things can’t get worse or that they can’t get any nastier, they do.
Might as well just call themselves New Conservatives, at this rate.
We did this in Australia and people literally died.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-66130105
>>>Known locally as “Robodebt”, it was an automated government scheme which incorrectly demanded welfare recipients pay back benefits.
>>>People received letters saying they owed thousands of dollars in debt, based off an incorrect algorithm.
>>>More than half a million Australians were affected by the policy.
>>>The scheme ran from 2016 until it was ruled illegal by a court in 2019. It had forced some of the country’s poorest people to pay off false debts.
Deliberate fraud i have no problem with. I would rather that they close tax loopholes and go after tax avoidance more but it’s still valid.
My issue with the people paid in error being saddled with debt is that the dwp could have stopped those payments at any time but let people accrue tens of thousands in debt then went after them for it. Yes there’s a case of you need to let them know when your circumstances change but when they can see you’re being paid over the threshold but give you carers allowance anyhow that’s on them.
Are these idiots trying to lose power as soon as possible?
>Keir Starmer is facing a rebellion over his plan to use direct deductions from people’s bank accounts and the cancellation of driving licences as part of a government crackdown on welfare fraud and over-claiming.
First paragraph, incredibly salient point.
This is **despicable** and ***will kill people.***
But I guess that’s the point, isn’t it.
If it only targets those who are genuinely criminal and on a large scale I am fine with it, they are stealing from the people that need it. If it is targetting normal people that might earn an extra bit of cash here and then maybe it is going a bit too far. I suspect it is the former.
Take people’s driving licences for owing money for benefits might be the worst thing I have heard from this government, are you still gonna vote for starmer?
> The Labour MP is also proposing to remove the power to apply to a court to strip people of their driving licences due to debt, describing the policy as a “poverty penalty”.
It’s not *just* debt.
The whole point of the bill is go after people who have been shown to have the means to repay but refuse to do so.
If you have been found guilty of fraud and refuse to pay the money back then I see nothing wrong with removing a drivers licence.
Just like I have no issue with someone being imprisoned for fraud for refusing to pay back the money.
> He adds that the government should learn from the Post Office scandal in which a faulty computer system led to hundreds of people being falsely accused of fraud and error.
Completely different situation.
Or this person saying that they don’t trust banks to reliably report how much money a person has in their account?
I’d be interested to see what the banks have to say about that.
> It will be disabled people, carers, pensioners and the very poorest people who are impacted by wrongful investigations and forced to endure burdensome appeals to prove their innocence.”
This already happens.
The only difference is that people have to print out their bank statements and take them in themselves.
And one of the biggest causes of benefits fraud last year was pension credit fraud, where pensioners simply lied about how much they had in savings to claim pension credit.
They did this by simply having their savings in a separate account and not making the DWP aware of that account.
This seems like a good idea. Not cheating the system? Then you have nothing to hide
So the official estimate of benefits fraud is almost £10bn per year, YET people are finding excuses for it while blaming their government for combating this
Honestly, this country just needs a harsh reality check, as too many people are absolutely detached from reality
they make it seem like its harassment, there are way too many benefits already, they have to check everyone 😁
Isn’t letting them check your bank in the agreement you sign up for already
Some people take advantage of the benefit system—whether they’re wealthy, lazy, or actively finding loopholes to exploit. Tax payers money, your money is being stolen but the solution is pretty simple: benefits should only go to people who genuinely qualify. Right now, the government can’t properly check personal savings, so they rely on trust. That makes it easy for people to claim help they shouldn’t get.
A better approach would be for banks and the government to work together. The government shares information on who’s claiming what, and banks check if anything seems suspicious. If they spot something that doesn’t add up, they flag it for review. That way, tax money goes where it’s supposed to, without compromising privacy or making life harder for people who actually need support.
It’s an issue that needs fixing so tax money, our money is not being stolen.
Labour have been sliding down the facist route for a few years now, including the sanctimonius pro Brexit (Hamas are friends) Corbyn era.
I would never vote Labour with Starmer as the PM. Labour needs to get back to its roots – a party of the people for the people. Not another elite working for the elite.
I have a wild solution; lets build an economic situation where normal people earn enough money that they not only don’t need help from the state to still be poor after working full time but they have enough money that people can fund charity support for those who need it.
Sure he does.
God forbid benefit claimants with savings have to pay back over payments and cases of fraud like the rest of us. Being disabled should grant you impunity.
Why do we need to spend time and money on new legislation for this?
I’m all for criminals being punished. Fraud is already illegal.
It’s also already possible to seize proceeds of crime.
Don’t we already have this covered?
£7b of fraud a year isn’t nothing, but it doesn’t seem like the nearest crocodile to the boat right now.
It’s peanuts in the big picture of our welfare expenditure and won’t make a dent in the problem of our rapidly aging population leading to the rapidly growing bill.
Taking driving licences makes no sense whatsoever as a punishment. They say they want to get people back to work, how does significantly limiting their options achieve that?
I’d have thought some sort of community service makes more sense, especially if set up in a way that also provides training and transferable skills which can be used to get work. Not only have you stopped the fraud, but you’ve created a taxpayer.