The usual lack of perspective
I am reminded of a project conducted jointly by Ohio and Pennsylvania, roughly 30 years ago, and glowingly lauded at the time by its director in the weekly IT paper "Computer World". Lists of welfare recipients in the two states were matched in order to catch double-dippers collecting welfare in both states.
They found a vanishingly small number; sorry but I don't remember, but it may even have been a big fat zero.
A letter to the editor set matters straight: what kind of project is called a success when it costs a $million or so, but yields no useful results? Far more was spent on trying to find malefactors than the money saved by catching them.
As then in the US, so now in the UK.
It seems obvious to me that if you have a social safety net of any description, it _will_ be abused. The trick is not to use draconian methods to drive the abuse level down to zero and thereby almost certainly screw over some innocent people. The trick is to recognize that the abuse is just a cost of doing business, and try to keep it under reasonable control without going to extremes. Not too different from retail businesses in relation to shoplifting.
Moreover, the more finely meshed your safety net—that is, the greater the number of people and conditions it attempts to deal with—the higher your abuse level.
Somehow this project smells of another attempt to zero an abuse rate, without regard for the innocents who will inevitably be swept up into a bureaucratic nightmare. It is an example of the "perfectionist" attitude in the Home Office that ignores human nature in matters large and small. (I won't name names, having sworn not to mention a certain loathsome female in charge there.)
Someone needs to ask the question in public, preferably in Parliament: when someone is wrongly included on this list, what mechanisms are in place for _rapidly_ correcting the error? If someone's pension gets wrongfully cut off, is there an emergency source of funds for them until the error is resolved? Or will they be left to starve in the dark and cold, a frozen, desiccated monument to the arrogance of you-know-who and her heartless minions?
PS: for some reason, this little rant reminds me of the Monty Python "Dead Parrot" skit.