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Content type: Long Read
In the UK, successive government ministers and members of parliament have made emotive proclamations about the malaise of "public sector fraud".
This year, former Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said that the welfare system "is not a cash machine for callous criminals and it’s vital that the government ensures money is well spent...[and] fraud is an ever-present threat."
In 2013, the UK's minister for the disabled made numerous claims that there were "vast numbers of bogus disabled […
Content type: Examples
UK police have used unmanned drones to monitor political protests for animal rights, by Extinction Rebellion, and against HS2, an extreme-right demonstration, and those held peacefully by Black Lives Matter, according to the campaign group Drone Watch. The Surrey, Cleveland, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, and West Midlands forces all admitted to using drones at BLM events. Others admitting to using drones include Devon and Cornwall and Avon and Somerset.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/…
Content type: Examples
A British freedom of information tribunal ruled that for national security reasons police in England and Wales may refuse to say whether they are using Stingrays, also known as IMSI-catchers, which are capable of tracking thousands of mobile phones and intercepting their calls, text messages, and other data. In 2016, the Bristol Cable found that police forces had bought hundreds of thousands of these devices disguised in public spending data by the acronym CCDC. Privacy International, which…
Content type: Examples
Tom Hurd, a senior Home Office counter-terrorism official who was at Eton and Oxford with prime minister Boris Johnson, will lead the UK’s newly-established biosecurity centre; Hurd remains a candidate to take over as the next director general of MI6 later in 2020. Hurd, who has worked as a diplomat at the UN and in security, has no obvious scientific background. Independent experts believe the emphasis on security is misplaced, and that monitoring the status of coronavirus via local and…
Content type: Examples
The UK Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government hired the AI firm Faculty, which had previously been contracted by prime ministerial special advisor Dominic Cummings to work for the Vote Leave campaign and which lists two current and former Conservative ministers among its shareholders, to monitor and analyse social media “to understand public perception and emerging issues of concern to HMG arising from the COVID-19 crisis”. Faculty was paid £400,000 for the work. The contract…
Content type: Examples
In May 2020, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care hired McKinsey to help define the “vision, purpose, and narrative” of a permanent organisation to manage test and trace programmes. The new National Institute for Health Protection will be led by Baroness Dido Harding. McKinsey was paid £563,400 for several weeks of work. The contract did not give McKinsey access to users’ personal data; however, the consulting firm will own all concepts, tools, databases, and other outputs it has…
Content type: Examples
Cambridge Assessment, which operates one of the UK’s three big examination boards that administer most GCSE and A-level qualifications, says it approached ministers and the Department of Education two weeks before the publication of both sets of exam results to warn there were major problems in the way grades were being allocated. The exam regulator, Ofqual, responded that its enhanced appeal process would be sufficient to handle the few cases it expected would arise. In the event, serious…
Content type: Examples
The English regulator, the Care Quality Commission, and its Scottish equivalent, the Care Inspectorate, refused to disclose, in response to FOI requests, the COVID-19 death tolls in individual care homes in part to protect providers’ commercial interest and avoid undermining the UK’s care system, which relies on private operators. The regulators do share data on an individual home basis with their governments. Research has found that coronavirus outbreaks were up to 20 times more likely in…
Content type: Examples
An immigration detention centre has been temporarily closed after several members of staff tested positive for coronavirus. The Home Office said Brook House, near Gatwick airport in West Sussex, has been shut for 10 days. It said a “very small number” of detainees had been moved to Colnbrook immigration removal centre near Heathrow.
Everyone being held at detention centres is being seen by a nurse and offered a Covid test, while face masks are provided; these are mandatory for all staff, it…
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A Sudanese man who had been seeking asylum in Ireland was deported to London just days before the UK capital went into the highest levels of COVID-related restrictions. The man, who is in his twenties, was deported last Thursday despite Irish government assurances to halt such removals during the pandemic. Due to travel restrictions currently in place, he is unable to return.
He is also now homeless and without support as London shuts down under Tier 4 lockdown restrictions, in the face of a…
Content type: Examples
The Home Office is pushing ahead with charter flights despite the UK’s new lockdown and soaring levels of coronavirus, in what campaigners say shows “contempt” for both deportees and the wider public.
Boris Johnson announced new, stricter coronavirus measures on Monday in an effort to slow the spread of the new, more transmissible variant of the virus, saying “everyone should now stay at home and only leave the house where absolutely necessary”.
Under the new rules, people are told that they…
Content type: Examples
In mid-September, “human error” led Public Health Wales to post the personal data of all 18,000-odd Welsh residents who tested positive for COVID-19 between the end of February and the end of August to a public server, where for about 20 hours it was readily searchable by any visitor to the site. For 1,926 people who live in enclosed settings such as nursing homes and supported housing, the data included the name of the setting; for the rest the information consisted of initials, date of birth…
Content type: Examples
The US company Hubstaff, which provides monitoring software to employers, says its UK customer base quadrupled between February and October 2020. The software tracks workers’ hours, keystrokes, mouse movements, and website visits. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development warns that workplace surveillance can damage trust.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54289152
Writer: Lora Jones
Publication: BBC
Content type: Examples
The UK Department of Health has hired the credit-checking company TransUnion to verify the names and addresses of people requesting home coronavirus tests, placing millions at risk of being barred from access to these tests. The government says the purpose is to prevent abuse of the public testing system; TransUnion says it does not run credit checks but uses various third-party sources, including electoral registers, to verify identities. The London Assembly, however, notes that up to 5.8…
Content type: Examples
In October UK health officials discovered that limitations on the number of rows on an older version of Microsoft’s spreadsheet software Excel led the system to miss 16,000 positive coronavirus tests and fail to alert an estimated 50,000 people who had been in close contact with them that they should quarantine. About half of the missed cases are thought to have been in northwest England, where infection rates were already rising. The government’s science advisors recommended revamping the…
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The UK exams regulator, Ofqual, awarded a £46,000 contract for less than a month’s work providing “urgent communications support” to the small research agency Public First, which is owned by James Frayne, a close associate of prime ministerial special advisor Dominic Cummings, and Rachel Wolf, a former advisor to cabinet minister Michael Gove. This contract brings to more than £1 million the amount of public contracts awarded without tender to Public First. Previous directly awarded contracts…
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Hundreds of wet and cold migrants were forced to spend hours in cramped containers on a “rubble-strewn building site” after arriving in the UK on small boats, a report has revealed.
In a rare insight into how newly arrived asylum seekers are treated by authorities, prison inspectors visited Tug Haven in Dover, where migrants are first taken from the beach or sea, and found a shortage of dry clothing and other basic supplies.
Images show migrants queueing at Tug Haven surrounded by rubble and…
Content type: Examples
[UK] Refugees and asylum seekers are wrongly sent NHS charges for 'tens of thousands' for healthcare
NHS hospitals are wrongly sending bills for as much as “tens of thousands of pounds” to asylum seekers and refugees in Bristol - and refusing some care upfront, it is claimed.
Asylum seekers and refugees are entitled to free healthcare in the UK.
But there are numerous anecdotes of vulnerable migrants receiving enormous bills for the treatment they have received and being refused hospital care not deemed “urgent or necessary”, according to support agencies in Bristol.
Some charging letters…
Content type: Examples
Asylum seekers and trafficking victims are being forced to travel miles on public transport despite lockdown restrictions because the Home Office has said they must continue to report to officials in person.
People who are awaiting a decision on their application to remain in the UK – including modern slavery victims and torture survivors – are required to regularly sign on at a Home Office reporting location.
This requirement was temporarily suspended in March because of the pandemic…
Content type: Examples
At least one immigration removal centre has already seen an outbreak of coronavirus, while detainees are left in limbo.
People who were released from detention centres at the start of the pandemic are being quietly locked up again despite the health risks and uncertainty caused by the second wave.
Detainees are having to isolate in Morton Hall detention centre after cases of Covid-19 were identified there last week, while those awaiting deportation are in limbo with flights repeatedly…
Content type: Examples
In early August, when the UK government announced it was purchasing 90-minute saliva-based COVID-19 tests called LamPORE and 5,000 lab-free machines to process them, supplied by DNANudge, clinical researchers were dismayed to find that there is no publicly available data about the accuracy or performance of these tests. While the tests could be a game-changer by offering rapid, on-the-spot testing with less discomfort for patients, no scientific research was offered to validate the tests, not…
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Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a secure mobile phone app into which users enter their name, address, date of birth, phone number, and doctor information, plus a scanned official identity document against which the smartphone can…
Content type: Examples
By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%. The govt’s SAGE committee has said that 80% of infected people’s contacts just be contacted and told to self-isolate within 48 to 72 hours for the programme to be effective. Local councils are…
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A gap in government guidance means that thousands of legal migrant key workers could be forced to choose between following new public health laws and destitution, according to Labour MPs and charities.
They are warning that no recourse to public funds (NRPF) conditions, which apply to roughly 1.4 million legal non-EEA migrants in the UK, could exclude thousands from the government’s new Test and Trace support programme, including many key workers.
They say the rules call into…
Content type: Examples
The Home Office moved dozens of asylum seekers involved in a Covid outbreak more than 120 miles despite an enforcement order saying they should remain in self-isolation for 14 days, the Guardian has learned.
Home Office contractors have been accused of being “beyond reckless” in their handling of the initial outbreak.
Among those who were moved despite the instruction to self-isolate, at least nine people were found to have Covid following testing, although the Home Office had initially said…
Content type: Examples
Migrants seeking asylum in Britain could be processed offshore under plans being developed by Priti Patel. Officials have ruled out Ascension Island and St Helena as impractical because of their distance from the UK but the Home Secretary is still seeking a third country where asylum seekers could be held while their applications are processed.
Sources close to Ms Patel countered criticism of the proposal by citing similar plans by Tony Blair when he faced a surge in illegal migrants crossing…
Content type: Examples
Thousands of asylum seekers currently accommodated in hotels are facing removal from the UK, the Home Office has announced.
A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Independent, states that evictions of refused asylum seekers will take place “with immediate effect” and charities have reported an increase in people being held in immigration detention centres.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/19/home-office-plans-to-evict-thousands-of-refused-asylum-seekers
Writer: Diane…
Content type: Examples
The UK government has instructed bars, restaurants, hairdressers, and churches to record visitors’ contact details when they begin to reopen on July 4 so they can be contacted later if necessary for contact tracing and testing. However, the industry was given no guidance on how to take care of the potentially sensitive data. The ICO said it would monitor developments and assess the data protection implications. Experience in other countries has shown there are risks of abuse by staff.
Source:…
Content type: Examples
Germany’s contact tracing system is thought to have been critical in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak, especially given superspreader events such as infections in meat packing plants. Each of Germany’s 16 federal states is responsible for health, and together with the national Robert Koch Institute they support authorities at city or council level, who are responsible for outbreak investigation and management, including contact tracing.
The country dubbed COVID-19 a notifiable disease early,…
Content type: Examples
In the second week of operation of the UK’s contact tracing system a quarter of people who tested positive for COVID-19 could not be reached because they had not supplied phone numbers or email addresses. Of the close contacts whose details were provided, contact tracers reached 90.6% to advise them to self-isolate. Data from the first week also showed that only 75% of contactees could be reached within the target 24 hours; contact was made with another 13.6% within 48 hours, and another 8.6%…