Later this week in Geneva, at the UN Human Rights Council, the final report will be presented of an investigation we undertook into poverty in the UK. A major focus is on universal credit, the welfare reform that merged six government benefits into one. While it has drawn intense scrutiny and criticism in Britain, surprisingly little attention has been given to what is likely to be its greatest and most enduring impact. What became apparent to us after interviewing leading scholars, digital experts, welfare rights organisations and individual claimants is that universal credit is not only a massive welfare policy reform; it also represents a transformational move towards digital government.

The pioneering postwar British welfare state is rapidly being replaced by what we term a “digital welfare state”. This is presented by the government as an apolitical and technocratic fix aimed at making government more efficient and cost-effective. But in some respects it is also a politicised effort to undermine the social rights of the poorest members of British society, while making it ever more difficult to legally challenge adverse decisions.

There is a desperate need for more information about what is happening behind the walls of government ministries

While no one would suggest that it has been a stealth exercise, this radical transformation has taken place without fanfare and with minimum scrutiny from parliament, the media and civil society. At least the government cannot be accused of being coy about its digital ambitions. It has clearly acknowledged that universal credit is a key part of a broader digital approach to government. Thus its 2017 Government Transformation Strategy promised the “total transformation of government” through digital technologies and boasted that it was “the most ambitious programme of change of any government anywhere in the world”. What a pity so few seem to have noticed!

Universal credit is the first major government service in the UK to become “digital by default”. That means that the application and most subsequent communication with the authorities take place online. But this approach has been deeply problematic for many of the poorest and most vulnerable people in receipt of benefits. Only 47% of those living on a low income use broadband internet at home, making it much more difficult to maintain a claim online. In addition, one in five people in the UK is not digitally literate, and nearly half of all universal credit claimants need assistance to apply for their benefits online. Universal credit is building a digital barrier between some individuals and their social rights.

Another problematic dimension has been highlighted in a recent report by the Child Poverty Action Group, aptly titled Computer Says ‘No’!”. The report demonstrates that the online environment in which beneficiaries communicate with welfare authorities makes it virtually impossible to identify, understand and challenge decisions that affect one’s livelihood. There is a real risk here that the rule of law will be replaced by the rule of web design. Meanwhile, the right of welfare claimants to an effective remedy when mistakes are made is in serious jeopardy.

But digital by default universal credit is only the tip of the iceberg of Britain’s emerging digital welfare state. Much more serious changes are happening behind the walls of UK government bureaucracies. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), for example, is busily automating the machinery of the welfare state, including by developing a “fully automated risk analysis and intelligence system for fraud and error”. What that is likely to mean, although hardly anyone outside the DWP seems to know exactly, is that a great many government databases (as well as private social media accounts, apparently) will be matched and analysed by new tech tools.

It would be a mistake to think of these as isolated problems. Many other countries are grappling with such digital issues. Commentators have warned that the Danish welfare state might accidentally die by algorithm, and in the Netherlands civil society is litigating against a government data matching system to detect benefit fraud, targeted especially at poor neighbourhoods. While these systems of disempowerment, discriminatory targeting and arbitrary privacy intrusions are for the moment mostly affecting poorer families in the UK and elsewhere, in the end no one will be safe. Why should the government not scrutinise everyone’s social media accounts to try to detect signs of income tax fraud, and why not require everyone to communicate with their GP exclusively via a digital portal?

This is by no means to suggest that everything digital is bad, or that fraud should not be exposed. There is actually enormous positive potential for the use of digital technologies in a modern welfare state. Digital interaction with the authorities may greatly lessen administrative burdens – for example, by reducing unnecessary travel to a welfare office or by automatically reminding beneficiaries that they forgot to attach a document to their application.

But in the design of universal credit, explicit political choices have been translated into technological design, with devastating effects on individual lives. And politicisation through technology has hardly been an issue of intense public debate in the UK, in large part because of the veil of secrecy surrounding digital innovation.

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Crucial new tech experiments, such as the automation of the calculation of benefits in universal credit, remain the bailiwick of civil servants, technologists and big consulting firms advising the government. This partial outsourcing has created serious transparency deficits that the current Freedom of Information Act cannot resolve. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism recently released a report that underlined systemic problems with uncovering even basic information about outsourcing in the area of digital government.

In a functioning democracy, political choices about the future of the digital welfare state should ultimately be made by the electorate, not by an engineer, government bureaucrat or private consultancy. But in order to reach the stage of a proper public and democratic debate about the digital welfare state, there is a desperate need for more information about what is actually happening behind the walls of government ministries. It is time for Britons to demand the truth.

• Philip Alston is UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Christiaan van Veen is special advisor on new technologies and human rights