DWP just gave a company a £15m contract to spy on benefit claimants

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has quietly awarded a lucrative contract to a private consultancy giant—this time to Deloitte. It is to expand the digital backbone of its Targeted Case Review (TCR) programme. This is a sprawling surveillance scheme scrutinising Universal Credit claimants.

The £15 million contract will extend over two years with an optional third. It is aimed at increasing “efficiency” in how the department investigates alleged benefit overpayments and fraud. But behind this familiar Whitehall outsourcing tale lies a much darker story. It is one of obsession, misplaced priorities, and ideological war on poor and disabled people.

Deloitte cashes in from the DWP while claimants struggle

Deloitte’s windfall comes at a time when 6,000 DWP officials are now dedicated to reviewing Universal Credit claims under the TCR programme. Nearly a million of these reviews are expected in 2024/25 alone.

On the surface, the DWP claims it has already “saved” over £1 billion from catching errors and fraud, projecting £13.6 billion in savings by 2030. But these headline figures mask deeper problems—namely, a broken welfare system made worse by relentless policing and punitive bureaucracy.

The fact that the DWP has turned to Deloitte should sound alarm bells.

This is the same firm that helped build the disastrous Track and Trace system during the COVID-19 pandemic, which the Public Accounts Committee described as failing to deliver “clear impact” despite costing £37 billion. Deloitte’s involvement in public sector projects has often been synonymous with ballooning costs, patchy outcomes, and little accountability.

Now, the DWP is trusting them with another vital public service. However, this time the stakes are even higher. This is because Deloitte will be directly affecting some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.

Benefit fraud: a manufactured crisis

The government’s obsession with so-called “benefit fraud” has long been exposed as ideologically driven rather than financially prudent.

Despite what the DWP would have you believe, fraud and error combined account for just a fraction of total government spending. In 2022/23, the National Audit Office reported that fraud across Universal Credit amounted to around £5.5 billion. This is dwarfed by the estimated £46 billion lost annually to tax avoidance and evasion. Yet HMRC does not get anything close to the TCR’s £443 million budget to chase that down.

Instead, the DWP has opted to create an entire parallel bureaucracy—staffed with thousands and supported by private contractors—to claw back what are often minor overpayments or honest mistakes made in a confusing system. Claimants, often disabled or struggling with mental health, now face a Kafkaesque process. They are interrogated and penalised for clerical errors that the DWP itself often causes.

Moreover, the emphasis on recovery over prevention betrays how the DWP’s systems are still not fit for purpose. If almost 20% of claims reviewed are “incorrect,” that reflects a failure of design, not criminal intent. Instead of simplifying access and reducing errors at the source, the department is doubling down on punishment.

Punishing disabled people while rewarding the private sector

This cycle of outsourcing, data surveillance, and administrative burden does little to address the root causes of poverty. It does, however, enrich firms like Deloitte and outsource major elements of government responsibility to corporate interests. Even call centres involved in TCR operations are outsourced. This is mainly to Teleperformance, a company with a history of worker exploitation and poor service standards.

The DWP frames this as a “cost-saving” measure. But let’s be honest: this isn’t about efficiency. It’s about ideology. It’s about reinforcing the narrative that poor people can’t be trusted with state support, and that private enterprise is the solution to every government failure—even when it demonstrably isn’t.

And what happens to the claimants caught in this ever-expanding dragnet? They face debt recovery letters, clawbacks, mental distress, and in some cases wrongful suspensions of benefits. The government spins this as “protecting claimants from falling into debt”. However, it is often the DWP that pushes them there in the first place.

The DWP in crisis, not a crisis of benefit fraud

Ultimately, the £15 million Deloitte DWP deal is a microcosm of everything wrong with the government’s approach to welfare. It prioritises cost-cutting over compassion. It assumes guilt over need. And it believes technology—especially when implemented by corporate consultants—can solve systemic poverty.

But a welfare system obsessed with detecting fraud rather than preventing hardship is not fit for purpose. If anything needs reviewing, it is not the claimants—it’s the ideology driving the DWP’s decisions.

Until then, millions will remain caught in a punitive system. It’s one that’s designed more to appease political headlines than to protect human dignity. And Deloitte, once again, will laugh all the way to the bank.

Featured image via the Canary