Designing the Digital with Communities – A Call to Action!
Our Vision
For the UK to become a leader in a community-centric approach to digital transformation through a pioneering Community Digital Fraud and Resilience Partnership. A partnership where digital technology and essential and statutory digital services support the design needs of people and communities. A partnership where trusted human relationships are central to policy making and implementation. A partnership where community organisations are involved in identifying risks and designing solutions from the beginning. A partnership where research, lived experience and government policy are connected in place rather than operating in separate worlds.
Where are we?
For many years, the Government has invested heavily in digital transformation. Digital services can make public services faster, more accessible and more efficient. This sounds like a win-win. However, our experience on the ground tells us something different. Digital transformation without sufficient attention to the requirements of human support and care, infrastructure in places where it is needed, and the context of local circumstances create new forms of vulnerability. We are now seeing the consequences.
Digital frauds and scams, including fraud connected to benefits and welfare systems, should not simply be viewed as a problem of individual criminal behaviour. In many cases, it is a symptom of a much wider set of social and economic problems: poverty, digital exclusion, lack of confidence, social isolation, insecure employment, poor access to trusted advice and people being increasingly dependent upon online systems that they do not necessarily understand.
The rapid development of AI is complicating this picture. AI use is amplifying and distorting the long-standing problems identified above and reshaping and exploiting those problems to increase fraud activity. This includes what we believe may become increasingly organised and locally embedded fraud capabilities through so-called “fraud farms” and networks targeting vulnerable people.
AI is making fraudulent communications, fake websites, impersonation, misinformation and social engineering more widespread and considerably more convincing. For a vulnerable – and not so vulnerable – person, a fraudulent message that appears to come from the Department for Work and Pensions, HMRC, a bank, a landlord or another trusted organisation can now be almost impossible to distinguish from a genuine communication.
This is not simply a digital skills problem. It is a community safety issue, an economic issue, a welfare issue and ultimately a national resilience issue. Resolving these problems goes beyond digital skills to a whole community infrastructure and a new social pact between the Government and local communities grounded in action, participatory policy design, and active partnership.
What do we know?
My name is Karen Noble, and I am Chief Exec of Pallion Action Group in Sunderland. Since 2010, I have worked closely with academic researchers alongside my practical work within communities. This work has included a longstanding research partnership with Professor Lizzie Coles-Kemp of Royal Holloway, University of London, where we have come together to develop a deep understanding of digital security, digital inclusion and the experiences of people navigating digital services. Working together has been invaluable in helping us understand the challenges faced by communities.
Our collaborative work contributed to the research and publication Hope Under Neoliberal Austerity: Responses from Civil Society and Civic Universities, including research examining digital services, social justice and the experiences of vulnerable communities. We also co-developed the work presented in the published paper Watching You Watching Me: The Art of Playing the Panopticon in which our focus group in 2013 foresaw how digital welfare would accelerate and amplify digitally enabled fraud.
What is particularly important is that some of the issues identified through in our earlier research are no longer theoretical. We are now seeing their consequences in our communities. From the start, our research has highlighted the importance of understanding people’s lived experiences rather than designing systems around assumptions about how citizens will interact with them. Sixteen years on from when we started this collaboration, the digital environment has changed dramatically. Artificial intelligence, online scams, deepfakes, automated communication and increasingly sophisticated fraud networks have created challenges that could not have been fully anticipated when much of this research began. We cannot wait until the damage is fully visible in national statistics. The people experiencing these changes today are already telling us what is happening. We need to listen and act!
One principle has remained constant: people and communities must be involved in designing the solutions to the problems that affect them. We cannot tackle digital fraud from Whitehall alone. However, we all bring our expertise to the table. National government has access to data, intelligence, technology and significant resources. Community organisations meanwhile have deep experience of local context and years building trust.
We know the people who walk through our doors, we know when somebody who places their trust with us becomes anxious about a message they have received. We know when someone is struggling to understand an online benefits application. We see people who have been scammed but are too embarrassed or frightened to report it. We see people who have become dependent upon others to navigate digital services, and crucially, we often hear about emerging problems before they appear in official statistics.
This creates an enormous opportunity, rather than viewing community organisations simply as delivery partners for individual projects, Government should recognise community organisations as an essential part of a national early-warning infrastructure national that enables proactive responses to the unforeseen damaging consequences of digitalisation. For example, benefits fraud needs a different conversation. We also believe that the national conversation around benefit fraud needs to become more sophisticated. There is a legitimate need to identify and prevent fraud. Public money must be protected. However, protecting the public purse and protecting vulnerable people are not opposing objectives. They should be part of the same strategy.
A person who has been manipulated into providing personal information, allowing somebody to access their account, responding to a fraudulent benefits message or becoming involved in a wider fraud network may themselves be a victim of exploitation. We therefore need to distinguish between deliberate organised fraud, opportunistic fraud, exploitation and vulnerability. The world is far more complicated than conventional threat models and vulnerability assessments suggest. A benefits fraud policy designed with the participation of communities on the front-line, supported by an active community-led early warning capability will enable us to make these kinds of judgements. We believe that this would result in more fraud-resilient essential and statutory systems and services that are experienced as a reflection of community values and needs.
If we fail to understand those differences, we risk designing increasingly punitive systems that do not address the causes of the problem. We want the mechanisms to help develop the solution; we are not writing simply to highlight a problem. We want effective mechanisms to share what we are learning and work together with Government to help develop solutions.
Our Call to Action!
We call on government, communities, academia, technology and public services to come together and to use our collective experience and expertise to help build something better.
We are putting Sunderland and the North East forward as a place in which to trial this new partnership. We believe Sunderland and the wider North East provide an excellent testbed for a new model of partnership between Government, community organisations, academia, industry, and anyone who can help and has a role to play.
Together let’s develop robust, community-led and government supported initiatives in the digital transformation issues that affect our communities the most:
- Digital fraud and scams affecting vulnerable residents;
- Benefits-related fraud and exploitation;
- The impact of AI on fraud and misinformation;
- Digital exclusion and vulnerability;
- The role of trusted community organisations;
- How people interact with increasingly digital welfare systems;
- Early-warning mechanisms that identify unforeseen consequences of digitalisation and the threats that ensue;
- Digital education and fraud prevention within communities;
- How Government agencies can work more effectively with local organisations.
The question is no longer whether digital transformation is coming. It is already here! The question is whether we allow communities – and in particular their most vulnerable members – to carry the consequences of that transformation, or whether we work together to ensure that technology strengthens communities rather than exploits their vulnerabilities.