by Unity

Hello LC readers I have a treat for you. Today we start publishing the first of our briefings – a document I’ve been working on for the past month or so. It’s not coming out all at once because there are some legal and other issues still to be resolved. But in coming days and weeks, more will be revealed.

Our focus is on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and in particular its recent decision to use lie detection technology to catch out benefit claimants.

We think that this is not only unethical, but the technology itself is so prone to error as to be useless for the purpose for which is it supposedly intended. So why is the DWP spending over a million pounds promoting it across local authorities? Has it done research into its drawbacks and limitations? If yes, then why is it still using it?



The background

In December last year the Queen’s speech contained a proposal by the Dept of Work & Pensions (DWP) to make benefits claimants go through lie-detector tests. If found guilty they would lose benefits for a month.

Various media outlets have earlier been fed examples of local authorities using lie detection technology to tackle benefit fraud: this BBC article, this Times piece and in the Birmingham Post. But while some local authorities claim success in saving money – none of the coverage has questioned the scientific validity of the technology or its [lack of] reliability.

DWP plans

In December 2008 it was a revealed in the House of Commons that the ‘voice risk analysis’ system, that was piloted in Harrow, and in several other local authorities with large IT/business services contracts with Capita will be trialled in up to twenty-five local authorities over the next year. Funding for the expanded trial is being provided by the DWP and will, according to Kitty Ussher MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, include “independent social research to determine the impact on customers’ behaviour”.

The trial does not, however, appear to include any kind of independent scientific validation of the system itself.

According to academics, this ‘voice risk analysis’ system is sold in the United States as a package consisting of a $2,000 laptop, software and operator training for around $25,000 per system. Our own investigations suggest that the DWP are paying around £10,000 for each system it provides to a local authority and that the funding for this year will provide an additional 150 systems over an above those used in the first stage of the trial.

Our assessment of the costs of the system, to the taxpayer, have been confirmed by information obtained by MPs and Peers via Parliamentary questions, which shows that that the first stage of the DWP’s trial (2007/8) cost the taxpayer over £720,000 and that a further £1.5 million pounds has been allocated for the current phase of the trial. Nowhere in this has there been any mention of any funding for the ‘independent social research’ that the government claims will be part of the current trial.

We can also reveal that one of UK’s largest and, for some, most controversial players in the outsourced public sector business services sector, Capita, is behind these trials and that all the councils testing the system, to date, have outsourced IT and business services contracts with Capita.

Millions more will be spent if the trial is successful. There is a lot of public money at stake here and, based on our own investigations, a lots of ordinary people who could face serious hardship for no valid reason if this system is adopted by the DWP and rolled out across the entire benefits system. In the worst case, some people could lose their home as a result of being erroneous flagged as a ‘high risk’ claimant by a piece of technology that rightly belongs, with perpetual motion machines and cold fusion, in the realms of pseudoscience.

Does it work?

Harrow Council were quick enough to trumpet the sums of money they claim to have saved by piloting this system, which cost them a reported £63,000, but much less was made of the fact that of the 119 claimants identified by the system as presenting a risk of fraud, only 43 were found to have been incorrectly paid benefits, a ‘false positive’ rate of almost 64%.

Two out every three claimants investigated by Harrow Council as a result of their being flagged up by this supposedly ‘proven’ technology’ as a potential benefit cheat were found to be entirely legitimate claimants. Is that really an acceptable rate of ‘success’ for a system that claims to be carry out a sophistical mathematical analysis of an individual’s voice and accurately identify their mental and emotional state of mind?

We don’t think so…

Academics say it only works in the sense it tricks and/or intimidates benefit claimants into disclosing information they might otherwise have withheld, or into withdrawing their claims, outright.

Does the DWP even care whether the system works, or not, as long at it propels enough people out the benefits system?

Why are we doing this briefing?

A key issue is the huge sums involved in the trial, the software and, if successful, the cost of rolling it out across the country.

Using lie-detector tests has become a cornerstone to cabinet minister James Purnell’s attempts to reform and ‘modernise’ the DWP. But we are not convinced the department has adequately researched the technology that it is advocating.

The DWP actually claims, on its website, that this is proven technology – we disagree and we are confident that we can demonstrate that, in the absence of independent scientific validation, the system the DWP is ‘testing’ should be regarded as being nothing more than a hoax and no more a reliable method of assessing benefits claimants than flipping a coin or employing a tarot reader to process claims.

There are other implications too. The same technology is being used in the insurance industry to purportedly detect people who lie about their claims. If the technology doesn’t work however, then there should be no reason to use it. On the other hand, if the government and corporations buy into the view that it does work well, then it may come into widespread use, with potentially devastating consequences for people.

So…

We’ll tell you exactly why it doesn’t work in the way the DWP claims, what it actually does and how it does it.

We’ll explain how easily the technology can be manipulated to produce results ‘to order’ and how this may have played a major part in convincing insurance companies and the DWP to buy into this system.

We’ll also explain how any council in the UK could generate the same results as Harrow with nothing more than a couple of press releases and some minor alterations to the scripts used by its staff when taking telephone calls about benefits claims.

We’ll also explain why something as simple and commonplace as the common cold, asthma or heavy smoking could get you branded a ‘high risk’ claimant by the Councils using this technology.

And…

This may be the biggest story we’ve run to date. It’s certainly the biggest investigation – over four weeks of detailed research, discussions with scientists and academics and hunting down the evidence which shows that the DWP’s much vaunted ‘lie detection’ system is a complete waste of public money that stigmatises benefits claimants on what amounts, in practice, to a coin flip.