When your mailbag brims with 25,000 letters and emails every day, deciding which to answer first is daunting. When lurking within are pleas for help from some of the country’s most vulnerable people, the stakes only get higher.
That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants – of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first – including handwritten missives.
Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting for too long for help. But “white mail” is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for officials to get to first.
By implication, it deprioritises other people, so its accuracy and how it reaches its judgments count, but both matters remain opaque. Despite a ministerial mandate, it is one of numerous public sector algorithms yet to be logged on the transparency register for central government AIs.
White mail has been piloted since at least 2023 when the then welfare secretary, Mel Stride, said it meant “those most in need can be more quickly directed to the relevant person who can help them”. But documents released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act show that benefit claimants are not told about its use.
An internal data protection impact assessment said letter writers “do not need to know about their involvement in the initiative”.
The assessment says correspondence can include national insurance numbers, dates of birth, addresses, telephone details, email addresses, details of benefit claims, health information, bank account details, racial and sexual characteristics, and details on children such as their dates of birth and any special needs.
People who work with benefit claimants are now voicing “serious concerns” about how the system handles sensitive personal data.
Meagan Levin, the policy and public affairs manager at Turn2us, a charity which helps people facing financial insecurity, said the system “raises concerns, particularly around the lack of transparency and its handling of highly sensitive personal data, including medical records and financial details. Processing such information without claimants’ knowledge and consent is deeply troubling.”
According to the information so far released, the data is encrypted before the originals are deleted, and is held by the DWP and its cloud computing provider. The name of the provider is one of many pieces of information about the system that have been redacted.
The DWP’s data protection impact assessment also says consulting individuals about this way of processing their data is “not necessary as … these solutions will increase the efficiency of the processing”.
Officials say it is complementary to existing systems, and flags correspondence which is then reviewed by agents to determine whether a correspondent is in fact potentially vulnerable. The DWP said no decision was made by the AI and no data processed by it.
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The vast trove of text is also used by the DWP “to determine insights” and create a “theme analysis”, although little more about what form that takes and how these insights have been used has been released.
“Prioritising some cases inevitably deprioritises others, so it is vital to understand how these decisions are made and ensure they are fair,” said Levin. “The DWP should publish data on the system’s performance and introduce safeguards, including regular audits and accessible appeals processes, to protect vulnerable claimants.
“Transparency and accountability must be at the heart of any AI system to ensure it supports, rather than harms, those who rely on it.”
The DWP has been approached for comment.
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