Government want to look at disability bank accounts to see what we are spending on: this is not good for us autistic.

I can see your reasoning, and for those people who's income exceeds their expenditure by a moderate amount consistently, and who have enough self control to keep a wary eye on their own consumption and expenditure our modern "conveniences" are wonderful.

As to your last line, providing we have the option to have a choice between cash and digital, that will be fine by me.

I don't know if things have reached a more sensible balance now, but when I worked in a companies I.T department in the 1990's the email server guys would be the source of the most juicy gossip.  

I remember once being told that the H.R. director (Who I seriously was crushing on at the time) was having or seeking boob reduction surgery, and every time I saw her after being given that awful knowledge I just wanted to say Nooooo..

Sorry, I'll keep using direct debits and contactless payments because otherwise I would never remember to pay everything and I abhor touching things too many people have touched.

For me increasingly digital systems are a massive benefit, the less I have to interact with people and physical things to do things the better.

To each their own, the option to have the choice is the happy medium.

your right, they can already do this, and they have ever bit of data and info about every one of us already.

most people are too foolish to understand but yet people from the middle east who came here to commit attacks knew about all of this monitoring and had code words in their text and phone calls... because text and phone calls go through a provider who is then bound by law to hand your entire text and call logs to the government, everything you do on phone is recorded, every text is stored in a database.... those idiots sending nudes of themselves the phone company sees them and stores them and hands them to the government who then sees them.... how foolish people are to not know this stuff. they have been doing this all times already. it makes no difference as you said its just media fear mongering things that already happen.

Don't EVER stop using cash.

DO NOT ADOPT CBDC's "for the convenience". 

FFS stop using direct debits, and paying "interest" on everything you own! The first takes all control away from you under the guise of helping you manage, and the second is financially speaking like voluntarily submitting to having leeches attached to your financial (metaphorcal) body.

Learn the difference between your annual turnover of money and your net cashflow, and (if you can of course, according to some members and people I meet in real life, some concepts I find obvious and "basic" are too difficult to follow) work out just HOW MUCH of you weekly income directly benefits you and your family.

I think you will all find (as I did) how incredibly unselfish with your money you all are. You literally throw it into the hands of rich strangers at every turn, who in exchange enact rules to further restrict and tax your activities, using those taxes to do what exactly?

Once they get you hooked on digital money, it'll be worth whatever (((they))) say it is on any given day, and your access to it will depend on a dazziling variety of ever changing factors completely outside of YOUR control. And the amount of financial fleas will multiply...

I too have read this. It is alarming and scary. 

But - this is mostly pre-election rhetoric, aimed at gathering support from the far-right part of the electorate. In the event, it wouldn't be cost-effective to check or monitor the accounts of all people in receipt of disability benefits. I believe (happy to be corrected if I'm wrong) that the DWP can already do this, if they choose to, as they can also monitor social media accounts, in any case, so what would change? 

The Tories are caught between a rock and a hard place, behind 8n the polls on one side and under pressure from Reform for the far right vote, so at this point, they'll say pretty much anything that might help them gain support.

interesting article here: DWP plan to snoop on benefit claimants' bank accounts will hurt disabled people (bigissue.com)

yes I read that they do flag up anything unusual to stop fraud etc which is needed off course as those that are at it should get caught.

But I dont think it is good for them to know decent genuine people where they spend their money if it is hobby craft or John Lewis for example. It can lead to more controlling measures in time. Which is worrying

The DWP can already investigate people's bank accounts if they have reason to believe claimants are fraudulently claiming benefits. As I understand it, I don't think the idea is to dictate what people can and can't spend their money on, but more to check that claimants' savings are not in excess of the benefit eligibility threshold.

Somehow, I think it's unlikely the DWP would cut a claimant's benefits because they had, for example, spent money on crafting supplies. To be honest, although the DWP would be able to see that a claimant may regularly spend money at a retailer such as Hobbycraft, that is probably as much as they would know. It would take too much time and effort for the DWP to also contact retailers to request details of exactly what the claimant had bought.

Whilst it may seem like an invasion of privacy, I don't think genuine claimants have anything to fear just yet. However, I am in agreement that the UK government lacks adequate knowledge of how autism can affect us.