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3 hours ago
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Calls are being made for an urgent independent inquiry after thousands of families were stripped of child benefit due to flawed Home Office travel data that claimed to show parents going on holidays and not returning.
Andrew Snowden, the Conservative MP for Fylde and the party’s assistant whip, said the government “must take immediate and transparent action” to address the failures of the anti-fraud benefits crackdown.
“Thousands of families have had essential child benefit payments wrongly suspended because of unreliable or incomplete data,” he said.
Snowden called for “a full, independent review of how this system was authorised, including how such unreliable travel data was used to make decisions on family benefits”. He said the findings must be published in full.
“These are not minor errors. Child benefit provides vital support and, for many households, it is the difference between managing and falling into hardship,” he said.
“It is simply unacceptable that families have been left out of pocket and forced to prove their innocence because of flaws in the government’s systems.”
His demands come three weeks after the Guardian and investigative website The Detail revealed HMRC had suspended child benefit of 23,500 families based on erroneous Home Office data, which recorded flights out but not back to the UK.
Within weeks of the launch of the crackdown, it emerged that thousands of innocent parents living in Britain had been wrongly flagged as leaving the country as a result.
The influential treasury committee, chaired by the Labour MP Meg Hillier, and the Liberal Democrats are also demanding answers from the government.
“For low-income households, even a short suspension can cause severe hardship – missed rent, debt or reliance on food banks,” said Snowden.
Dozens of families who have been in touch with the Guardian and the Detail spoke of the distress they have faced, with some complaining they felt as if they were being treated like criminals.
Among those caught out are a family fleeing the war in Ukraine, a parent who did not take the flight the Home Office recorded as she was in hospital with sepsis and several who had already stopped receiving the benefit.
John Vine, a former chief inspector of borders and immigration, said the cases highlighted broader weaknesses in the UK’s entry and exit recording systems.
“It worries me that we’ve got a system that is supposed to be recording when people come back into the country or have left the country … that should be fairly accurate. If that is not the case, that needs looking at urgently as well, because it would have implications beyond the issues regarding benefit claimants.
“It may be that the entry and exit checking system at the Home Office is either not working properly, or is subject to such delays in recording.
“The home secretary has the power to direct the chief inspector of borders and immigration to look at it as a matter of urgency.”
He said issues with Home Office data had been a recurring theme during his tenure, from 2008 to 2014, and in the reports of his successors.
“One of the recurring themes in my annual reports was poor record-keeping and reliability of data. And it goes back many years.”
The most recent annual independent chief inspector of borders and immigration report, published in September, found Home Office data was “often incomplete, inconsistent, or simply wrong”.
Privacy experts say the Home Office appears to have used passenger name record data – information collected when someone books a flight, including itineraries, addresses, contact details and payment information.
Under laws that were introduced initially in the US after 9/11, and later in Europe, this data was originally shared with authorities only for counter-terrorism and serious crime purposes.
Sana Farrukh, of Privacy International, said the HMRC scheme was a textbook case of “function creep”.
“It is something Privacy International has warned about, function creep and mission creep. Where it starts out with ‘this will only apply in minimal cases, or we are going to use it for a clearly demarcated purpose’, but over the years it expands.”
An HMRC spokesperson said: “We’re very sorry to those whose payments have been suspended incorrectly. We have taken immediate action to update the process, giving customers one month to respond before payments are suspended. We remain committed to protecting taxpayers’ money and are confident that the majority of suspensions are accurate.”
