Thousands of UK families have had their child benefit wrongly suspended after HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) relied on incomplete travel data in its latest crackdown on benefit fraud.
Among those affected are parents from Liverpool who travelled to Amsterdam with their autistic children, only to have their benefits stopped after HMRC wrongly assumed they had left the country permanently.
The error came to light shortly after reports by The Guardian and The Detail revealed that hundreds of families in Northern Ireland had their payments halted after returning home from holidays via Dublin airport. The travel data gave HMRC the false impression that they had taken one-way trips abroad while still claiming child benefit.
HMRC has since confirmed that it sent letters questioning the residency of nearly 35,000 claimants—around 0.5% of the UK’s 6.9 million families receiving child benefit.
Those caught in the error include a widow who briefly travelled to France after her husband’s death, a Lithuanian man who has lived and paid taxes in England for 24 years but was flagged after a short trip to Italy, and a Hove family whose return flight from Australia was not properly recorded.
HMRC apologised and admitted that some payments had been suspended incorrectly. The agency said: “While this affects a very small number of child benefit claimants, we are very sorry to those whose payments have been suspended incorrectly. They should respond to us as soon as possible so we can check their case, reinstate payments, and ensure no one is left out of pocket.”
It added that it was “urgently reviewing the current process and actively considering options” and has begun checking employment data before suspending payments.
However, many parents remain outraged.
Cerys, a music teacher from Liverpool, said she took her three children on a same-day trip to Amsterdam to help two of them, both autistic, get used to flying. “Child benefit are now saying that there is no evidence of me returning with my family so I need to produce a ridiculous amount of evidence to prove that I have not been living in Amsterdam since February,” she said. “This is the one time in God knows how many years we have gone abroad.”
Another claimant, Simon Pilbrow from Northern Ireland, said his benefits were stopped after a family trip to Vienna. “I called up [HMRC]. I’m normally a pretty chilled person, but I was absolutely raging at having to prove that I live in my own country,” he said. “Bit of a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare.”
Similarly, Mark Blackmore, a theatre technician from England, had his benefit stopped after a trip to Spain and sent HMRC an invoice “for wasting my time” after spending hours proving his residency.
Matt and Judy from Durham, guardians of two autistic boys, also saw their benefits cut off after a family trip to France. They said: “I can see how somebody’s come up with a good idea: ‘Why don’t we check everyone who’s left the country on a one-way ticket?’ But they haven’t checked whether they come back in or not. This is clearly a fishing expedition based on a half-baked idea.”
The government’s fraud crackdown, launched in August, aims to save £350 million in benefit fraud, with the Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould saying: “From September we’ll have 10 times as many investigators saving hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money.”
Under current rules, child benefit can be stopped if a claimant is outside the UK for more than eight weeks. However, the international travel data used by HMRC “shows that customers have left the UK and may have not returned” without acknowledging that much of the border information was incomplete or inaccurate.
