The HMRC Child Benefit debacle – first spotted in Northern Ireland, with tens of thousands of families across the UK being treated as fraudsters and denied money they are eligible for, based on deeply flawed Home Office data that wasn’t properly checked, as the law requires – starkly illustrates a far deeper problem with government (ab)use of our data. 

While the current HMRC / Home Office tragedy is just the latest in a long line of examples, the underlying dynamic is clear; it’s evident in government communications too. 

The powerful yearn to be remembered and the civil service strives to deliver what they are tasked with doing. Politicians in particular want something they will be remembered for – tearing down what they didn’t create to replace it with their ‘legacy’. The seductive lie of control encourages visions of policy cathedrals intended to glorify their time in power long after they’ve gone; edifices that often don’t outlast them by more than a year.

Gordon Brown has his response to the 2008 financial crisis, George Osborne, austerity and omnishambles. Iain Duncan Smith has Universal Credit, Wes Streeting plans to decimate General Practice, and Tony Blair will forever have Iraq – and remains hell-bent on adding ID cards to that. 

“Not invented here” matters to politicians more than most. The legacy state of ‘ID’ right now is a mix of providers across the public and private sectors, and a blanket refusal to allow the creation of ‘share codes’ – a ‘credential’ or ‘certificate’ that proves something about you, like a Clubcard confirms eligibility for discounts – which have long been government’s goal. 

This is entirely a political decision. 

The various “share codes” announced by the PM at the end of September (i.e. Right to Work and Right to Rent checks) could be delivered via existing ID providers, but a Home Office that wants to manage your identity will never approve something that allows others to build better digital services. Just as the Blair Institute assumes ID cards are a prerequisite for delivering anything they envisage, so the Home Office minimises assistance and services to anyone else running an ID system. 

These are petty institutional games, not state building.

“We have to build a new state and shut down the legacy state…” said Cabinet Minister Darren Jones, “…with digital ID making people’s experience of that new state fundamentally much better,” a Blair-serving, tone-deaf soundbite, misconceiving a Forth Bridge scale endeavour. The State is not something separate from the people it serves – as evidenced by the harm it causes time and again to those it overlooks or ignores – not something to be shut down on a whim. 

Razing institutions to the ground to build new ones may seem attractive, but it’s not always even possible, much less wise. While reform is always possible, some reforms need reform after reform. 

Those lusting for power want to reform the State in their own image, using the technology of the day. Democracy is, will and always has been about rebuilding the State for the emerging state of the world. Technology is used by power, or is deliberately chosen not to be used by power – whichever is more convenient.

Reform(er)s often focus only on those things they care about, and neglect everything else, possibly so as to prevent another restart. And, in time, the names of those public services that leadership neglects become known as their scandals: NCC1, Carers Allowance, Child Benefit “fraud”, Windrush, Horizon and the sub-postmasters… 

Once you shut down a service, it can be potentially impossible to restart it again – especially if you’ve sold off the buildings and made the staff redundant. (Palantir’s current worldwide ad campaign declares their services are “making Americans irreplaceable”, which is weird in the UK.

Institutions use the technology how they want. 

The Current Digital State

Universal Credit is a “digital first” service, but there is still no digital service for the NCC1 form – that horrific edge case is still paper-only; the cold bureaucracy of trauma. Parents are put through pointless bureaucracy for free childcare because it ‘keeps the costs down’. The NHS National Data Opt Out requires you to use a digital service for yourself – but if you want to make the same choice for your children, you have to use a paper form and send that in.

Institutions use the technology how they want. 

HMRC uses Home Office records to strip honest people who haven’t left the country of Child Benefit for not returning to the country, because they never left! (That same data could be used to inform tax evasion and tax avoidance cases for people who are in the country more than they say – but that is a bit harder, so it’s ignored.)

Politicians and their advisors came in to do a thing, having recognised or having been convinced that this change is important. They just have to hope there are no catastrophic consequences that they hadn’t considered which come due on their watch.

It’s possible Wes Streeting didn’t mean to issue a legal Direction to NHS England that the NHS should lie to patients about him breaking the “pandemic only” promises about Covid data. It’s just what he did, because he was listening to those who would benefit from that broken promise.

What the data is, and what the data isn’t

The details will come out in the next few weeks, but the data the Home Office shared was not the data that HMRC thought it was. But the State did what the State does and used the most beneficial reading to make individual civil servants and politicians look good.

HMRC wasn’t required to check other data sources, so it didn’t. (While you can receive Child Benefit without being in employment, working an hourly paid job at Tesco does strongly suggest that you haven’t left the country.)

In a Database State driven by ID cards

In the Database State, in a digital state linked by digital ID for “convenience” and “efficiency”, a finding by HMG that you had ‘moved abroad’ would not just automatically terminate your child benefit payments but also terminate your health care and ongoing medical treatments, terminate your repeat prescriptions and your GP registration, and remove you from waiting lists. 

Some of that may be survivable, and some of that mess can be undone. Being taken off a waiting list can be reversed by adding you back, for example – but you are added to the back of the queue…

Your medical records and medical notes have previously been excluded from such powers and such ‘secondary uses’, but our colleagues at medConfidential expect Wes Streeting to remove that exclusion and to include health data in the coming months when he weakens other protections there to prevent these types of mistake that can have real consequences for your health.

Mr Streeting is also expected to remove your right to object to the Government using your medical records for any administrative purpose that they choose, as the TBI culture groupies at the just-launched “Data Alliance” want him to do.

Many people want things to be the way they used to be; to put the world (and you) back to the way it seemed to be to them when they were a child. Others have delusions of grandeur and competence. “Take it or leave it” might be driving the TechBros and billionaire-backed influencers and their influencees right now, but while you can drive users who remain with your product, driving an electorate is a distinctly different proposition.