UK pensions dept goes shopping for spy-van tech with £2M surveillance tender The Department for Work and Pensions has gone shopping for covert cameras, live-streaming kit, and vehicle-based recording gear as it lines up a £2 million upgrade to watch fraud suspects in real time. A newly published tender sets out plans for what it calls a "live surveillance strategy," built around discreet cameras fitted …
The article's a bit light on detail but this smacks of paying top dollar to go after small fry when looking up their FaceTube accounts might be way faster and cheaper (does self incrimination online like that count as evidence?).
Different dept. but how about paying top dollar for going after the wrong 'uns in the Panama Papers and such like?
Going after small fry.
Well isn't that par for the course? Spend millions, to claw back a few thousand, whilst sweetheart tax deals are being thrown around for all an sundry, if you have the right level of billionaire status of course.
I'm all for reducing fraud on our already horrifically high welfare bill in the UK, but adding another £2 Million to the cost isn't going to help.
Also, too light on the details, I can't imagine you'll be getting a national service for that cost either.
Disability fraud is for example so low it can't be measured and most of what the papers call fraud is actually "fraud and error", majority of which is errors being made by the professionals at the DWP.
Worse than many are actually underpaid and aren't claiming what they are entitled to or being wrongly told they aren't entitled to it when they are.
UK social security payments are markedly lower than other European nations and our papers compare us with the hellscape known as the USA where vast numbers of people are sleeping on streets or in their cars while working as they can't afford housing or the employment they can get isnt reliable.
Where the mentally ill aren't treated but instead harassed, criminalised, assaulted and abused by a system that views them.as sub human and expendable.
UK social security needs a root and branch purge of the private sector medical insurance infiltrators who have spent 30+ years stoking allegations of fraud to cause division while creaming off vast sums for themselves.
It used to be that for every £1 claimed "fraudulently" there was £7 which someone was allowed but left in the pot unclaimed. (This was confirmed to me by a DWP fraud investigator when I was involved with their IT)
The amount of actual, intentional fraud is vanishingly small compared to the total benefits bill.
It's still right to try and reduce or eridacate fraud but I've seen the terror in deserving applicants who are so scared of the application process, assessments and being labeled a fraudster that it causes genuine mental health issues, the stress of reassessment and the very real prospect of some uncaring contractor or unqualified "medical" person fucking up an application is horrendous.
I have a friend who went through an assessment for her PIP renewal (despite her consultant doctor advising the DWP against it). The process was so traumatic for her that she ended up in psychiatric hospital. She (thanks to the help of her MP) did manage to keep the PIP, but any potential saving in PIP was dwarfed by the cost of inpatient care for months... Moreover, before this happened she was employed, after she was released from hospital she was unemployed until she recovered enough to work again and therefore got even more money from the state compared to if the DWP have done nothing.
The DWP undiagnosed me with chronic fatigue because, over a telephone call, I “didn’t appear fatigued”. This set off an 18 month appeals process that involved me getting free legal representation thanks to a Wiltshire law firm. 1 month before the tribunal the DWP sent me a letter accusing me of *fraud* wrt PIP, and then 2 days before the tribunal date they caved - completely.
They dragged that out for 18 months, and added a fraud allegation on top, and they must have known they never had a leg to stand on for any of it, because they never bothered putting it in front of a judge.
18 months I was broke and relying on friends and family. I was so stressed out and ashamed.
Bastards. Complete bastards.
HMRC could do with a a few of them to pitch outside
- Farnborough and Northolt Airport
- London Cruise Terminal, Tilbury and Southampton Port.
- LHR, LGW, LCY
- Ascot/Cheltenham racecourse, Henley, Wimbledon, Silverstone F1
To make sure the rich/corporations - UK, overseas, Non-Doms and above fuckers aren’t evading tax, claiming unreasonable marketing/entertaining expenses on their ways to and from Monaco, Dubai, Jersey/Guernsey, Isle of Man and other Private Jet, Cruise, destinations and events.
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Covert cameras, live-streaming systems, and in-vehicle recording kit sought to catch out fraudsters
To get the state pension you need to qualify by having contributed for 30 something years or I guess the state tops it up if you’ve not.
I’m actually not sure on the rules but assume everyone gets something & most get all their due.
What fraud are people eligible for the state pension likely to commit that requires covert surveillance?
Will it be people claiming whilst actually living abroad?
Fairly sure checking passport control & bank transactions would spot that quite quickly & not require snooping vans.
Can someone make this make sense?
“For the 2026/27 tax year (starting April 2026), the full new UK State Pension will rise by 4.8% to £241.30 per week, or approximately £12,547.60 annually, following a triple lock increase based on earnings growth. The basic State Pension (for those who reached state pension age before April 2016) increases to £184.90 per week.”
Hardly a fortune - About half minimum wage. Hardly surprising pensioners need to claim pension credit, council tax benefit and there was outcry over winter fuel allowance. Compared to endemic ingrained entitled tax dodging by the middle-class and upwards..
(* Note - older pensioners will be entitled to the older state second pension/SERPS.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2025/09/state-pension-rise-triple-lock/
The problem is the millions wasted here, when you have happy chappy racist Farage and other Mps and establishment types taking personal million pound gifts, but the average joe, better not fart the wrong way, if they want to donate a friend more than a couple of thousand. Oh thats right set yourself up as a ltd company and pretend your a political organisation and you have no questions asked.
Id say the real fraud is the still billions owed for all that crap ppe and non existent, with a good few of those sitting in the Lord's clearly liable, but sod all is done. Mr JCB himself, another large tax bill unpaid, but the responses will be he creates job. Oh does he now, well that is all good, but his staff don't get to pick and choose what they pay. Tice can lob his taxes through dormnant companies and then spread rest as personal when its business for tax save here and there. Anything done, oh he is a naughty boy take a couple of tea.
Untapped and unlimted MPs expenses, outdated from inception - centralised resource and control simples, also for shouting and lobbing insults - pretty sure that doesn't take 90k either.
Plus reality is the golden tripple lock maintained business was and has always been a vote pleaser and con, we have all good longer lives and healthier so the original idea does no longer, work and also it didn't take into consideration pensioners with rental portfolios, private share dealing, massive savings and housing stock worth millions if not 100k in the first place. Plus the private pensions, with the boomer generation coming out of work and into retirement, they bring with them one of the healthiest retirement pots and investments of any group. Like it or lump it, not saying they should not get anything, but if the generations after them have to take in work benefits, both work, cannot afford a mortgage and stucck providing the same lot rental income, where do they think the little top of the state pension going to come from.
Like the winter fuel allowance, it should of been means tested when it was introduced. Lets face it billionairs millionaires and those on final salary pensions in high 2 figure and 3 figures don't need a state pension support in reality. Plus the reality that if your living in a 5 bedroom home and its just you, then wanting fuel help in winter, probably makes sense that if your wanting support you have tried your best to move into more optimised homes, I certainly wont want a massive family home even with grandkids when I am older - let families have them and have something I can heat effectively and at decent cost month to run and if I get lucky in life with post retirement wealth, it would be unfair of me to claim or be given benefit I do not need.
No need for spy vans or making people feel like criminals, just common sense, housing sutiable for age and guess what even if it is retirement villages planned you can then fit in the health, social care and resolve lonelynees, as they are in a community of like minded and similar ages. Plus, there costs per month are in line for their occupancy like when you start out in life on first place you don't go I need the state to help me out with a massive house to heat.
Further ensure that all companies working have to pay a wage / salary to profit % that means the profits made after paying for staff properly and legally enforcing a sensible % difference or what 5 % max from top to bottom of the tree. No corporate boards needs to be paid millions or billions and dodgy share and other crap incentives that steel from society. It is known by research most c suites adding a max of 3 to 5 % or even less in most cases, so why force their greed to mean the government pays the tab for their staff, if your found to have over the top profits with a large % in work benefit staffing situation your get hit with the equivalent taxing on those profits to repay the cost to the tax payer for bailing you out.
Thats just a number of simple ways to sort the whole situation and not waste millions on appeasing the silent moronity who read information and papers even a 5 to 7 yr outpaces from early school learning.
I am sure lots will be 'ageism, i have paid in x yrs, blah, blah', you either face up the reality of the issues we have and how they were caused and work as society or we will just end up going straight to the crapper as a country.
That's an unusually dumb thing to say, even for you.
Pick up a newspaper, 2/3 of them will have something in there about immigrants, benefit cheats, scroungers, shirkers not workers, take your pick. The government responds to this and directs its civil service accordingly.
Now, if you'd made the point that those newspapers and the fleet of grotesques they promote (ie. Farage and his ilk) are trying to distract you from the millions they're taking out of the system in tax avoidance, jobs-for-mates and sundry corruption, then you might have had a point.
https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-wants-your-cookie-aba1c536b0d8
Ministers rotate through departments every eighteen months or so, often with no domain expertise, while permanent secretaries and deputy directors have been in post for a decade and own the briefing pack. The narrative they walk in to read on day one tends to be the one that gets implemented.
The strongest evidence, in my opinion, is continuity of direction across governments that supposedly disagree on everything. Welfare conditionality, hostile environment, surveillance creep, outsourcing of public services: that trajectory has barely flinched through Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss (briefly), Sunak, Starmer. Either every elected government independently arrived at the same conclusions, or the policy spine sits somewhere other than the ministerial bench.
The British press isn't a neutral readout of public concern, it's owned by a small group of very wealthy proprietors with consistent political preferences. Leveson laid out in some detail how cosy the relationship between senior officials, ministers and those proprietors had become. So "civil service responds to press pressure" reduces to "civil service responds to what a handful of billionaires want covered," which is structural deference to the rich, expressed through a media intermediary. Spy vans for claimants, polite letters for the offshore set.
Which brings me back to why I called it classist in the first place. If the institution were genuinely neutral, you'd expect whistleblowing, internal dissent, leaked memos, resignations on principle, something. Instead you get a state that has spent years pressing harder and harder on benefit claimants and small businesses (MTD, IR35) while large multinationals negotiate their tax bills over lunch and sail through with sweetheart settlements. That asymmetry doesn't sustain itself for decades across multiple governments without the permanent machinery being broadly comfortable with it.
RIPA. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was passed in 2000. The DWP can carry out directed surveillance on the authority of a "senior member" of the department, Check out the wikipedia article for the long list of organisations who can do this sort of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000
Share the burden of the system with the BBC, for TV Licensing, Local Authorities for many things, including putting the bins out early, not taking the bins in, dog fouling, fly tipping, car parking and so on.
On the plus side, it creates employment, and soon everyone can be working - plenty of surveillance jobs to go round - DWP will overtake the NHS as the largest employer in Britain
Mostly used by "bin inspectors" AIUI. That's happened to me at least a couple of times; only noticed as the funny little works van with the cage on the back came round for my bin specifically a couple of hours before the bin lorry and drove off with the contents. Another time (years later, so probably another example) I had some council guy on the doorstep haranguing me about not using the slop bucket. It all seems a bit creepy and surely they have more significant people to investigate than some reclusive widow who's occasionally rude to people online.
When Anglo·saxon Attitudes are involved you mostly get a world best practice poverty punishment system.
The fine British institution of The Workhouse was extant well into the 20th century.
I was recently re·reading Henry Mayhew's Letters to the Morning Chronicle 1849·50 and was struck by the similarity to our times by how large swathes of the working population were rapidly thrown into greater poverty and destitution by technological change (mostly steam.)
