Big Data Blog

The coallition government, and in particular David Cameron, have been lambasted lately over the clampdown on benefit cheats/frauds in the UK. Undoubtedly a serious issue in the UK, which loses approximately £3bn. every year from false benefit claims.

The main point of contention is that the government plans to engage (and has already done so) commercial personal credit rating companies (e.g. Experian) to do the digging on their behalf. There are quotes floating around that Experian could save the government £17mn. from housing benefit cheats alone (a deal brokered by Labour). Obviously great news, but the value of the contract that Experian picked up appears to be undisclosed (queue a FOI request, someone).

Instead of further lining private company pockets with taxpayers money, this is a task that could easily be carried out by the good will of the general public. Ministers have been quoted that the “public sector cannot do this kind of work”, and that private companies have the skills. This may be so, but there are a good deal of people in the UK (myself included) who would gladly put in a bit of volunteer time to trawl through the various datasets (DWP, Housing Agency) and look for patterns and trends that suggest benefit fraud.

As a first step, the government would need to anonymize the personal information (straight forward per-record random hash, assuming integrity is maintained accross data sets). This data can then get pushed out via BitTorrent (minimising costs) to those willing to take a look. Individuals could be placed under contracts to not disclose findings, and the government can collate and assess the patterns from each set of results.

Alternatively, the data could be pushed through a system along the lines of the London Datastore, enabling people to comment, review and assess the data as it comes in. Take a few of the clever chaps at The Guardian who were responsible for publishing the crowdsourcing site for MPs expenses, and we could start getting a feel for who the most likely cheats are, allowing the DWP to fine tune their targetting radar, all for a dramatically lower price than Experian are likely to be charging.

Tim O'Reilly has been an advocate of government-wide data revolutions, so why can’t we take that a step further and do something good with all this data, and not restrict it to pretty plots of historical trends.