HMRC 'function creep' means spying on your travel plans to block benefits

Governments weaponising data against people is one of the top themes of 2025. In this latest example, tax agency uses post-9/11 era travel surveillance to administer tax benefits, and to wrongly accuse people of fraud.

The UK Government has paused cuts to parents’ child benefits after it was revealed that one of its surveillance practices had made numerous mistakes.

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HRMC), the UK tax agency, had suspended 23,500 payments to nearly 350 families, erroneously believing that they had left the country. In fact, many had simply booked to go on holiday – and the UK government did not have the data to know if they did.

It appears the government used travel surveillance data, implemented by many governments worldwide as a response to 9/11, to accuse people of no longer living in the country, and therefore wrongly claiming benefits even though they lived in the country, paid taxes, and were entitled to those benefits, forcing them to justify themselves to an incredulous government.

One mother was told she had left for the Netherlands and never returned, despite giving birth to a baby in Belfast the next year, The Guardian reports.

Another checked in to a flight from London’s Heathrow airport but, as it was cancelled, never took it. She contacted HRMC to inform them – but they they didn’t believe her.

“We’re very sorry to those whose payments have been suspended incorrectly,” HRMC said in a statement, adding it would not suspend payments until it had “checked with the recipient first, giving them a month to confirm if they are still eligible.”

But the debacle reveals how the government’s controversial tactic of accessing airlines’ passenger bookings data to inform assessments is not fit for purpose, both in principle and in practice.

Sharing of passenger records between agencies to determine benefits is a clear case of “function creep”. Once purportedly used to prevented terrorism, this data is now a factor to decide your government allowance. 

In the U.S., the flow of data across the Federal government, enabled by the Department of Government Efficiency has, according to one expert, ‘reshap[ed] the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control’. In the Netherlands, the controversial System Risk Indication system (SyRI) joined up data from across the government to find people most likely to commit benefits fraud, leading to a court decision that its use unlawful. As the UN Special Rapporteur stated, we risk “stumbling, zombie-like, into a digital welfare dystopia.”

This is a systemic erosion of principles proportionality and purpose limitation. It places people already working hard to support their families under more stress. People should not have to fight a faceless system that has already decided they are guilty of something. And as we’ve fought for years: government agencies should not have access to limitless data about us all.

In our experience, a government reliant on data soon starts to see the data as the source of truth. Governments would rather put their faith in algorithms and systems than its own people.

At the heart of this fiasco is the collection and flow of data across government. The public had no idea that this information was being gathered or shared, no transparency about how their travel information was being accessed or used or repurposed, and no warning that their benefits could be cut as a result. Governments routinely hide behind the language of ‘national security’, ‘fraud prevention’, and the new mantra of ‘modernisation’ to justify these opaque practices. This means no one can challenge the practice nor check whether personal data is being used fairly.

We have documented the numerous occasions governments have linked its benefits system with the surveillance state, and the UK is far from alone.

The new default for governments is to use the myriad of brokers to collect data on you, draw conclusions about you and your loved ones, and suspend your rights.

They treat everyone as a hostile, a criminal, a fraudster, until you’re able to prove yourself innocent.

It has to stop.