Listening to the debate about pensioners winter fuel payment and the fact it is now being paid only to those on pension credits. We see protests from many organisations who quite rightly want to protect those who may suffer that this will hit pensioners who's cost of living due to many factors, inflation, income, poor home insulation, health etc. who do not claim pension benefit and who will suffer because of this cut.
Thanks to the triple lock we have seen appropriate state pension rises but as we know living on just the state pension alone is very difficult and speaking from experience the little savings I have have not kept up with inflation.
However I believe that if we could accurately identify those who are likely to struggle in this country we could make decisions on who should receive help much more fairly and not solely rely on those who have submitted claims.
The government knows who lives here, how old they are, where they live, knows what car they drive, knows if they have gone on a foreign holiday, knows their health situation. Surely in this modern age we could have algorithms that could take all the information about people and accurately work out their state. Google, Facebook do this for marketing purposes why cant we do it for humanitarian purposes.
If you look at who has had a foreign holiday, who has a posh car less than 10 years old, then this would be a fair indication that they can be ruled out of the poverty band.
Ideally we could see those who shop at Waitrose, who eat out or have takeaways regularly, this would again show people who are not on the poverty line. This may be a step too far even though commercial companies are already doing this and getting past GDPR issues as legitimate use for marketing based on their interests, all those boxes you just tick!
So this would rule out those who should not receive these benefits and then allow the government to look at those that are left.
If we look at the opposite scale, those who pay no income tax, drive a very old car, shop very frugally, do not eat out or have takeaways etc. live in poorly insulated housing then we could narrow down on those that most likely need help.
The algorithms to do this would be easy to develop, the data exists and is accessible if we deemed it was right to do so with appropriate protections.
Additionally we could also identify those in other areas of poverty, child poverty, single parent families etc.
We have Think Tanks and Working Parties on all manner of things and I would like to see a government create one on finding a better way for identifying those on poverty.
There would and should be many objections to some of the ideas above, Big Brother etc. but we know that the Social Media companies are already pushing these areas. Business may fear that some people may switch their habits to avoid detection i.e. keep their old car, stop shopping at Waitrose, eat less takeaways etc. but this would be relatively few and would it matter? I think the impact on trade would be minimal, the impact on those that really need help could be huge.