What is it?

The digital welfare state is the growing use of data and digital services, platforms and tools in the design, administration and monitoring of the welfare state.

It increasingly involves private sector providers, embedded in the state from policy to frontline delivery.

While many features and aims of the digital welfare state are worthwhile, such as speeding up the processing of claims for financial support, it is also often premised on digital surveillance and privacy-invading data harvesting and analysis, and plagued by algorithmic mistakes and AI bias.

This was the first short essay I wrote about it back in 2020, which outlines the key issues of opacity, privacy, inequality, politically-driven technologies, and the digital divide.

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Here’s some things I’ve already written about the digital welfare state:

UK Fraud Bill targets benefit claimants for mass surveillance, an article for Computer Weekly about the digital surveillance planned by UK Government, which could target millions of benefit claimants with no grounds for suspicion

Digital social security futures: an essay for the British Academy

Automating public services, a careful approach: a report for Promising Trouble

DWP's 'automation' of universal credit discriminates against single mums, researchers say, article by Adele Walton in the Big Issue, based on research by me and Morgan Currie

Disabled benefit claimants are being unfairly targeted by a secret algorithm, an article for Huck Magazine

And a series of blogposts:

• Could a basic income save us from welfare surveillance?

• What is relational technology?

• What do we know about DWP’s use of AI?

• Why is the digital welfare state being replicated globally?

• The secrecy at the heart of digital welfare

• Automated welfare embraces generative AI

• What principles should underpin digital public services?

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