Yes, there is a clear and long-established right in law for the DWP to look into people’s bank accounts if there is a suspicion of fraud. This power is giving the Department the ability to look into the bank accounts of people where there is no suspicion at all. All of us at some point in our lives claim a social security benefit, and we are giving the Government the power to look into our bank accounts with this measure.
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The Minister rightly mentioned that the idea first appeared in a DWP paper in May last year. That spoke of the need to balance this power against people’s right to privacy and to ensure that the new power was appropriate, was no more than necessary and had the right checks in place. Those proposals, having been mooted in May of last year, should have been published. We should have been able to see what exactly the proposals were. There should then have been an opportunity for discussion. They should have been consulted on, and there was plenty of time between last May and now to do all that.
Instead, the first we saw of this measure was last week, and there has been no consultation at all since that initial mooting of the idea in May last year. If the Minister can give any explanation for why that dreadful course of behaviour and procedure has been followed, we would all be interested. It seems to me incapable of being defended.
The amendment gives the Government extremely broad powers, with no checks in place, and it has been done in a way that minimises parliamentary scrutiny of what is proposed. I find it very hard to see how that can possibly be defended. No doubt the Minister will tell us that at some point there will be some document setting out checks and balances and so on, but that needs to be part of this scrutiny. It should not be that the Government take it all away to come back in a few months’ time to tell us how they will constrain the use of this power.
Finally, it occurs to me that the power being introduced could be used to establish benefit eligibility for people who do not currently claim benefits. We know, for example, that a large number of people do not claim pension credit, but are eligible for it. A lot of the information about whether they are entitled to pension credit is already held in the public sector, and in local councils in particular. If it were possible to check whether people had less than the threshold savings level, that could help in establishing eligibility for pension credit automatically. Can the Minister tell us whether that is intended with this proposal?