So we chatted and said one of our pals in the pub the other night, Mark.
And I said, Mark, what do you think about the fact that next year in 2025 DWP will be
wanting access to all your bank accounts, will be, you know, checking through your details.
And he said, oh, I don't need to worry about that, Eric.
He said, you know, I've never claimed benefits in my life.
DWP will be interested in me.
Now, Mark's quite well, always been quite well paid.
He's recently retired.
He's 66.
And, you know, I've never, never had any time out to work, never had to claim any disability
benefits of his life.
So he's not really connected in with the benefit system, doesn't know a huge amount about it.
And he was quite surprised actually when I told him, now that he's 67 and although he
has lots of personal pensions and, you know, work-based pensions, which, you know, seem
really well off, he also has a state pension.
What Mark didn't realize is, you know, state pension is a benefit in the same way that
job seekers allowance is a benefit.
So you know, with job seekers allowance, you need to have paid national children to be
entitled to it.
The same with state pension.
It's a contributory benefit.
So Mark was under the impression that because he had quite a lot of private pensions that
he didn't come under the scope of DWP's bank account checks, unfortunately does.
And any of us who are claiming state pension benefit or what we call state pension will
fall under the same remit as well.
Which surprises a lot of people.
Now I'm only 56, but if I was at state retirement age and I was claiming state retirement pension,
then I think I'd find it's quite intrusive and the reason for that would be that with
state pension, there's not a huge dependence on what your income is.
So it's a contributory benefit, as we know, and you need to have paid national insurance
to be entitled to it.
However, even if you're a millionaire, you're still entitled to it.
So I kind of think that the DWP saying what they're trying to do is stop fraud is it doesn't
really fit with most state pensioners.
Now I know, so the DWP have said that they've got two reasons for doing this.
Okay, so the first one is to verify that people don't have undeclared sources of income.
Now that doesn't really impact the state pension because it's not means tested.
So you can have any level of income you like and it wouldn't affect the amount of benefit
that you get.
But the second reason is that you're not claiming benefits or state benefits that you're not
entitled to because you're out of the country.
So I suppose if you're out of the country, you need to declare you're out of the country.
From checking the bank accounts, they can verify if you're nine months on the run and
all your shopping is done in the Algarve, then the potentially going to ask questions about
whether you are based in the Algarve or you're based in the UK and whether your tax position
is correct.
But that feels like a secondary concern to me if this really is about stopping fraud
increasing revenue for the inland revenue, then I wonder whether including people who
just get state pension is the right thing to do.
I mean, many of you will wonder whether this is the right thing to do for any benefit.
You know, let me know what you think, think of that in the comments.
So this is a big change.
So it's not just that the checking them two things, what they're also doing is doing data
matching. So we're in the past, if you were claiming house benefits, for example, they'd
ask you for bank accounts and details of where your income is and they could scan them bank
accounts and get various bits of information out to them.
Now what they're doing is they're looking at what bank accounts you declare, looking
at what bank accounts are kind of under your name, what's been declared by the other government
departments, what's been declared by the local council and we cross-checking all these things.
I suppose there is a risk there that say you're a pensioner and you claim a pension and credit
and you fill the forms into your, to the best of your ability.
However, they come across a Bradford and Bingley account from 30 years ago that you forgot
you didn't know you had, you know, are you going to feel when they, when they challenge
you about this that you're being accused of fraud, but actually it was an oversight.
I'm not saying they will, but there will be a lot of legitimate concerns about this where
people feel that they've got to do a lot of checking, go and find an old bank statement.
It's gotten quite an illness on a lot of people really to validate everything before they
make the declarations for the D.B.
Peterstar checking.
So there is, it is a big change and some people are saying it's the thin end of the wedge.
You know, if they do in the future decide that stay petitions become unaffordable, they
want to means test it, then this is a perfect way to do that.
And so I've always said that I can't see a state pension at any point will become means
tested because if it does, it's, you know, hugely expensive.
However, if this is all done with AI, links into bank accounts dragging down huge amounts
of data and then the analysis is done by a computer, maybe it won't be overly burdensome.
Maybe this is a kind of way in the future for the state to reduce the costs of mean
testing because mean testing is very expensive and bureaucratic thing to do when it's done
by humans, when it's done by AI with massive sources of data across all bank accounts and
all tax centers and all departments, maybe it becomes, you know, a much cheaper exercise
and more possible for them to do.
So they're my thoughts anyway.
So we're looking at next year here now.
And what we need to think about in terms of preparing for this change is, you know, making
sure we know where all our bank accounts are getting our records straight because when
DWP ask us, we're on one year's and what kind of bank accounts we've got, we need to provide
the answers.
Last thing we want is to slip up, miss something out.
And then when they do their ultimate analysis, do a lot of calculations, they come back to
us and say, Hey, mister, why haven't you claimed or declared this particular source of income?
They do say potentially that there will be quite a few people who it runs the other way
for where, you know, people have declared a certain set of income a while ago and the
money has gone down and down and down.
Once the DWP validate what's going through the bank accounts, they become back and say,
Oh, you know, you are entitled to some additional money so that your, your benefits will correct
themselves and you will be getting more in terms of benefits.
Now that weren't a fact, people who claim just state benefits, but potentially it might
claim some particularly more vulnerable and particularly, you know, very old vulnerable
people who don't keep up on software, the records, maybe haven't done an update on the
finances with the DWP for quite some time.
Anyway, it's quite a divisive thing.
You know, there's a lot of chatter on the internet about this.
So I don't know what your thoughts are, but I would love to hear them.
So let me know what you think.
Cheers, Nam.