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Jess Paine and her daughter. Thousands of families have had their Child Benefit payments stopped, including for trips they never took. Photo by Jess Paine
The UK government is under pressure to launch an independent inquiry after thousands of families were stripped of their child benefit due to flawed Home Office travel data which claimed to show parents going on holidays and not returning.
Among those affected is a mother who was recorded as taking a flight she never even checked in for, as she was in the hospital with sepsis at the time.
Andrew Snowden, MP for Fylde and Conservative assistant whip, said the government “must take immediate and transparent action” to address the failures of the anti-fraud “Thousands of families have had essential child benefit payments wrongly suspended because of unreliable or incomplete data,” he said.
Mr Snowden called for “a full, independent review of how this system was authorised, including how such unreliable travel data was used to make decisions on family benefits” and said the findings must be published in full.
“These are not minor errors. Child benefit provides vital support and, for many households, it is the difference between managing and falling into hardship.”
“It is simply unacceptable that families have been left out of pocket and forced to prove their innocence because of flaws in the government’s systems.”
“For low-income households, even a short suspension can cause severe hardship - missed rent, debt, or reliance on food banks,” said Snowden.
His demands come three weeks after The Detail and the Guardian revealed HMRC had suspended child benefit of 23,500 families, including hundreds in Northern Ireland, based on erroneous Home Office data which recorded flights out but back to the UK.
Within weeks of the launch of the crackdown it emerged that thousands of innocent parents had been wrongly flagged as leaving the country as a result.
The influential treasury committee, chaired by Labour MP Meg Hilliard, are also demanding answers from the government about the fiasco, as are MPs from Sinn Fein, SDLP, and the Liberal Democrats.
Families
Sharna Vincent and her family had booked to go to Portugal in October 2023 but couldn’t make the trip due to a serious illness.
Two years later, on 15 October 2025, she received a letter saying they had information she had left the country and were stopping her child benefit.
The letter was very distressful: “It said ‘we could look at reclaiming some of the child benefit paid.”
“I don’t want them to back claim all the money, because I can’t afford it,” said Ms Vincent, who lives in the north east of England.
She described the demands for proof for her phantom holiday as completely absurd. “It’s like saying I’m the tooth fairy and I have to prove that I’m not”
“They’ve (HMRC) just set themselves this ridiculous goal (saving £350m) and they are not even thinking about the impact, which is just ridiculous. Now you’ve got all these families who have had their child benefit stopped, it’s so wrong.”
“I was in hospital for eight weeks and in intensive care for a day.
“I called up the helpline, explained it all, explained that I’d worked for the same company for 30 years; they weren’t interested.”
Jessica Paine received a letter from HMRC in September stating that her child benefit had been stopped as the tax authority “had information” that she had “left the UK” in March 2024. They gave her one month to prove otherwise.
Ms Paine said she was shocked by the “bizarre” letter as she had not actually travelled when they said he did.
“I was due to go to Mexico …. but I hadn’t checked in. The work trip was postponed.”
“I tried to get in touch with the Home Office, but my goodness you literally cannot speak to a person at the Home Office as it turns out,” said Ms Paine, a university lecturer, from the Isle of Wight.
She said she “very begrudgingly” responded with the mountain of records HMRC required including print outs of all her bank statements and all her medical records.
She said she felt it was wrong and a breach of privacy to require sensitive medical records be sent to strangers at HMRC.
“I don’t feel very happy about having had to send that,” she said.
She also questions how HMRC have information on a flight she did not take but don’t apparently have records that show she was in and out of the country three times this year.
When she rang HMRC to correct this they said: ‘Oh, we don’t have that information’.
She is incredulous at the behaviour of HMRC and their response that they are now cross-checking everything with PAYE records which don’t exist for people who file their own tax returns or are not in work. “I’m self-employed, so I work as a lecturer for a university but on a self-employed basis.”
Immigration data
John Vine, former chief inspector of borders and immigration, said the cases highlight broader weaknesses in the UK’s entry-exit recording systems.
It worries me that we’ve got a system that is supposed to be recording when people come back into the country or have left the country….that should be fairly accurate. If that is not the case, that needs looking at urgently as well, because it would have implications beyond the issues regarding benefit claimants.
“It may be that the entry and exit checking system at the Home Office is either not working properly, or is subject to such delays in recording.
“The Home Secretary has the power to direct the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration to look at it as a matter of urgency.
He said issues with Home Office data was a recurring theme during his tenure, from 2008-2014, and in the reports of his successors.
“One of the recurring themes in my annual reports was poor record keeping and reliability of data. And it goes back many years.
The most recent annual ICIBI report, published in September, found Home Office data was “often incomplete, inconsistent, or simply wrong”.
Privacy experts say the Home Office appears to have used Passenger Name Record (PNR) data - information collected when someone books a flight, including itineraries, addresses, contact details and payment information.
Under laws that were introduced initially in the US after 9/11, and later in Europe, this data was originally shared with authorities only for counter-terrorism and serious crime purposes.
Sana Farrukh of Privacy International said the HMRC scheme is a textbook case of “function creep”.
“It is something Privacy International has warned about, function creep and mission creep. Where it starts out with ‘this will only apply in minimal cases, or we are going to use it for a clearly demarcated purpose’, but over the years it expands.
Any review of the scheme would encompass decisions taken by both the Conservative and Labour Governments. The HMRC-Home Office data sharing scheme was approved in November 2023, and a pilot took place between March and December 2024. The scheme was then expanded earlier this year.
An HMRC spokesperson said: “We’re very sorry to those whose payments have been suspended incorrectly. We have taken immediate action to update the process, giving customers one month to respond before payments are suspended. We remain committed to protecting taxpayers’ money and are confident that the majority of suspensions are accurate.”
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