School of Social and Political Science

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Dr Currie’s project Automating Universal Credit – which investigates the automation of welfare in the UK – has featured in reports by the charity Amnesty International and campaign group Big Brother Watch. The reports are critical of the DWP’s implementation of digital technologies in the UK’s social security system, including concerns about the effect on claimants’ human rights. 

 The reports are: 

•  “Too much Technology, Not Enough Empathy”: How the UK’s push to digitalize social security harms human rights - by Amnesty International. 
  The Amnesty report quotes from a 2024 article in the journal First Monday, co-authored by Dr Currie: Automating Universal Credit: A case of temporal governance. 
• Suspicion by Design: What we know about the DWP’s algorithmic black box and what it tries to hide – by Big Brother Watch 

The BBW report draws extensively on a new study  that analyses Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about the DWP’s use of automation and machine learning for fraud detection in Universal Credit claims. Dr Currie and colleague Dr Alli Spring developed the report along with the BBW so it could incorporate the findings into the BBW report on the same issue. 

Dr Currie – who works in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS), at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science – said: “I’m just happy to support in any way the work of civil society groups, who have always been the hardest hitting and nimblest at holding DWP to account around its use of automated technology.” 

Learn more about Automating Universal Credit on the project website.