Welcome to the Ministry of Truth: Labour’s ‘Fear Act’ Receives Royal Assent

Welcome to the Ministry of Truth: How Labour’s Fraud Act Deputises Your Bank as State Informant

The Ministry of Truth is Open for Business: New ‘FEAR Act’ Unleashes Orwellian Nightmare on the Working Class…

When a piece of legislation acquires a nickname before it even receives Royal Assent, you know something has gone badly wrong. The “FEAR Act” they are calling it, and fear is precisely what the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Act 2025 is designed to instil. Not in tax evaders hiding millions in offshore accounts. Not in the organised criminal gangs milking public contracts for billions. But in disabled people claiming Personal Independence Payment, carers exceeding arbitrary earnings thresholds by a few pounds, and pensioners with modest savings they forgot to declare.

The Act received Royal Assent on 3 December 2025, granting the Department for Work and Pensions and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs powers that would make even George Orwell’s Inner Party jealous. Your bank can now be compelled to scan your account for “suspicious” activity and report you to the state without telling you. The DWP can enter your home, search locked cupboards and garages, demand three months of bank statements, and use AI systems to flag you for investigation based on algorithms even the department admits it cannot verify for bias. The Public Accounts Committee found the DWP has not done enough to understand the impact of machine learning on customers to provide confidence that it will not result in unfair treatment.

All of this, we are told, is necessary to combat the scourge of benefit fraud. The government claims benefit fraud and error cost £9.5 billion in overpayments during 2024-2025, equivalent to 3.3% of total benefit spending. A serious sum, to be sure. But let us apply some perspective, that unfashionable virtue in modern political discourse.

The Arithmetic of Class Warfare

The tax gap in the 2022/23 financial year was £39.8 billion, approximately six times higher than the amount overpaid in benefits due to fraud Full Fact. Yet HMRC criminal investigations have reduced from 749 in 2018-19 to 344 in 2023-24, a collapse in enforcement that tells you everything about this government’s priorities. You are 23 times more likely to be prosecuted for benefit fraud than tax fraud, despite tax evasion costing the economy far more.

Think about that for a moment. A single mother in Hartlepool who fails to declare a few hours of cleaning work faces covert surveillance, bank account trawling, and potential prosecution. Meanwhile, the tax gap continues to haemorrhage tens of billions annually while HMRC investigations collapse and the wealthy employ battalions of accountants to exploit every loophole Parliament obligingly provides them.

This is not an accident. This is not poor policy design. This is the state’s class instinct made manifest in legislation.

Ten million people receive the benefits covered by the new powers Computer Weekly. Nearly half the country will have their financial lives subject to algorithmic scrutiny, their spending patterns analysed for “fraud indicators” like foreign travel or savings above arbitrary thresholds. DWP’s own figures show that three-quarters of people whose benefit claims are flagged as suspicious actually have no fraud or error related to their claim at all Computer Weekly. Seventy-five per cent. Three quarters of investigations are chasing ghosts, destroying lives in pursuit of nothing.

Consider the perverse efficiency of it. According to the government’s analysis, if the powers work as estimated, they are expected to generate approximately £250 million in net annual revenue, less than 3% of the estimated annual loss to fraud and error Disability Rights UK. For this paltry return, we sacrifice the privacy of millions, subject disabled people to AI-driven persecution, and normalise mass financial surveillance as the price of accessing social security.

What This Means For You

• Bank Secrecy is Dead: The DWP can access your data directly from the bank without your knowledge if they trigger an EVM.
• Surveillance is Automated: Algorithms will flag “regular transfers” (like gifts or side-hustle income) as suspicious.
• Warrants are Easier: Investigators can enter homes and locked areas with greater ease.
• Three-Month Rule: Recovery action now legally requires a look-back at a minimum of three months of your financial history.

A History Written in Suspicion

The surveillance of the poor has deep roots in British soil. The Victorian Poor Law’s “less eligibility” principle demanded that relief be so unpleasant, so degrading, that only the truly desperate would accept it. The workhouse was not just an institution but a warning, a public spectacle of what awaited those who failed in the marketplace. We have abolished the workhouse but retained its spirit, replacing physical degradation with algorithmic humiliation.

Privacy International analysed the DWP’s 995-page staff guide on conducting fraud investigations and found surveillance methods including physical surveillance, mobile phone examination, and compelling private companies including airlines, PayPal, supermarkets and bingo clubs to hand over customer data Privacy International. The department has been hiring covert surveillance officers to follow claimants, filming them as they go about their daily lives, looking for that damning moment when someone on disability benefits walks a few yards unaided or carries a shopping bag.

What triggers the EVM?

• “Unexpected Income”: Received a birthday gift? Sold an old sofa? The algorithm is watching.
• “Lifestyle Contradictions”: If you claim PIP for a disability but are seen buying petrol or going to a café, the system will flag you as a fraudster.
• Trading Patterns: Selling your old clothes on Vinted or eBay? If the computer decides you’re a “trader” avoiding tax, you are in the crosshairs.

This isn’t just about catching criminal gangs. This is about criminalizing the survival strategies of the poor.

The DWP awarded a £15 million contract to Deloitte to expand the digital backbone of its Targeted Case Review programme, with 6,000 DWP officials now dedicated to reviewing Universal Credit claims and nearly a million reviews expected in 2024/25 The Canary. Six thousand people employed to police the poor. Imagine what they could accomplish if deployed instead to pursue tax evaders or examine the labyrinthine corporate structures designed to spirit profits beyond HMRC’s reach.

The Technology of Suspicion…Guilty Until Proven Innocent

The Act effectively reverses the burden of proof. With the power to demand three months of bank statements as a minimum requirement for “recovery action,” the state is working on the presumption of guilt.

We know the DWP’s track record with technology. We remember the scandals, the wrongful debts, and the lives ruined by bureaucratic error. Now, we are handing them “teeth of metal”, AI-driven tools to freeze accounts and seize assets based on data that is frequently flawed.

The Eligibility Verification Mechanism, that anodyne bureaucratic phrase concealing profound intrusion, represents something genuinely new and disturbing. Banks will be directed to check millions of bank accounts for unspecified indicators of potential breaches, with accounts flagged for investigation without any prior suspicion of fraud, error or overpayment needed Computer Weekly. This is suspicionless mass surveillance, the digital equivalent of stop-and-frisk applied to everyone who dares claim benefits.

What “triggers” these flags? According to government analysis, think tank Policy in Practice estimates the total amount of benefits that is unclaimed because people do not apply is now £22.7 billion a year The Ferret. Twenty-two point seven billion pounds in unclaimed benefits while we build surveillance infrastructure to claw back pennies. The poor are so terrified of bureaucratic persecution that they forgo entitlements rather than risk investigation, and the state calls this a success.

Frequent transfers from PayPal. Regular income from platforms like Vinted. Foreign travel. Savings above certain amounts. Any of these can flag your account, subjecting you to investigation even if you have done nothing wrong. The bill removes the threshold of ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect fraud that DWP previously required, enabling intrusive surveillance without any justification Computer Weekly.

Let us be clear about what this means in practice. A disabled person who manages one “good day” a month, who summons the energy for a brief shopping trip or a meal out with friends, can have their benefits suspended because AI flagged their bank showing expenditure at a restaurant. A carer whose charge has a brief hospital stay, giving them time to pick up a few shifts at work, risks catastrophic overpayment demands because they exceeded the earnings threshold by £20 without realising the arbitrary rules had changed.

These are not hypothetical scenarios. These are the daily realities reported by benefits advisers, disability rights organisations, and the claimants themselves when they dare speak publicly.

On the Uses of Error

The government and its media allies will insist this is all about “fairness to taxpayers,” about ensuring benefits reach only the deserving. Let us examine that claim with the scepticism it deserves.

First, the technical argument. The Information Commissioner stated he does not currently view these powers as proportionate, meaning they may be unlawful and a breach of individuals’ right to privacy under the Human Rights Act. When the Information Commissioner, hardly a radical firebrand, suggests your surveillance regime might be illegal, you have perhaps gone too far.

Second, the efficacy argument. DWP has acknowledged that its ability to test for and take steps to avoid unfair impacts across protected characteristics is currently limited due to deficiencies in its data collection Computer Weekly. They are deploying AI they cannot verify for bias, pursuing investigations they know will be wrong three-quarters of the time, all to recover sums that represent a tiny fraction of the losses to tax evasion.

Third, the precedent argument. Liberal Democrat MP Steve Darling warned the bill risks “Orwellian levels of mass surveillance” Disability News Service during Commons debates. When you normalise suspicionless surveillance for one category of citizen, when you deputise banks as state informants, when you grant algorithmic systems the power to trigger investigations into millions of lives, you have changed something fundamental about the relationship between citizen and state.

The government will say: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” This is the tyrant’s eternal refrain, the logic that legitimises every encroachment on liberty. Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. Privacy is about dignity, about the right to conduct your life without presuming the state’s gaze upon you, judging every purchase and transaction.

What This Reveals

“I think there are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all, frighten people and secondly, demoralise them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.”

“And I think our system is based on trying to make people stupid, demoralised and unhealthy,… pic.twitter.com/vD8f2rKi7U

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) December 4, 2025

Here is what the FEAR Act tells us about contemporary British governance. It tells us the state considers working-class people inherently suspicious, potential criminals requiring constant monitoring. It tells us disabled people’s dignity is worth less than the marginal cost savings from aggressive fraud investigation. It tells us Labour, the party that once defended workers against exploitation and surveillance, now sees no contradiction in building the most extensive welfare surveillance apparatus in British history.

A 2013 survey found Britons believe almost 24 per cent of all benefits were claimed fraudulently, 34 times greater than the official 0.7 per cent estimate Full Fact. The government has successfully convinced the public that benefit fraud is rampant when it is actually tiny, creating the political cover for this legislative assault on privacy and dignity.

The tragedy is not just the legislation itself but what it reveals about Labour’s abandonment of its own principles. A party that once defended the dignity of labour, that fought means testing and surveillance as tools of class oppression, now embraces them with technocratic enthusiasm. They speak the language of “efficiency” and “fairness” while building systems that presumeably guilty everyone who needs state support.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if the same ingenuity, the same resources, the same legislative determination had been applied to tax evasion and avoidance. Imagine if HMRC received the funding and powers now granted to the DWP. Imagine if banks were compelled to flag suspicious transfers to offshore accounts with the same enthusiasm they must now flag disabled people’s Tesco purchases.

The money is there. Some economists argue the tax gap could be closer to £100 billion when properly calculated Full Fact. That would fund the entire NHS twice over. That would eliminate child poverty, rebuild crumbling schools, properly fund social care. But pursuing that money would require confronting power, challenging the wealthy, taking on the accountancy firms and corporate lawyers who make avoidance and evasion possible.

Easier, far easier, to surveil the poor. They cannot afford Deloitte’s lawyers. They have no lobby in Parliament. They depend on the state and can therefore be controlled, monitored, punished for the crime of being vulnerable.

This is not governance. This is cowardice dressed as efficiency, cruelty masked as fairness.

The FEAR Act stands as testament to Labour’s moral collapse, to a party so terrified of being accused of weakness on “scroungers” that it will betray its own people, sacrifice their privacy and dignity, and build surveillance infrastructure any authoritarian regime would envy. They have learned nothing from history except how to perfect the techniques of oppression.

When your bank becomes an agent of the state, when algorithms decide whether you deserve to eat, when disability is treated as fraud waiting to be exposed, you live in a society that has lost its moral compass entirely. The working class built this country, paid for its infrastructure in blood and labour, earned through centuries of struggle the right to social security as citizenship, not charity. Now they must bare their bank statements, submit to covert surveillance, and prove their worthiness to survive.

Big Brother isn’t coming. He received Royal Assent on 2 December 2025, and he has your account details.