Europe’s digital welfare revolution: Progress at what price?

The case for digitalisation appears compelling at first glance. Eurofound’s research maps digital social protection portals that can dramatically improve transparency, increase system responsiveness, and—perhaps most crucially—help combat the persistent problem of benefit non-take-up. This represents the bright face of the digital transformation: a leaner, faster, and ostensibly more accessible system that promises to serve people in Europe more effectively than traditional bureaucratic structures ever could.

However, this technological sword cuts both ways. The increasing reliance on digital processes threatens to create inequalities through digital exclusion. While governments might celebrate high online application rates as evidence of successful digitalisation, such metrics can be dangerously misleading. The Czech experience offers a sobering reality check: in early 2025, one-third of online unemployment benefit applicants required in-person support from Labour Office staff to complete their applications. Many other online applicants may have relied on informal help from relatives or friends. So, much of what appears as “digital” access is, in reality, assisted-digital access—a crucial distinction that policymakers too often overlook.

The trend toward exclusively online benefits, of which there are examples in at least five Member States plus Norway, risks creating insurmountable barriers for the digitally excluded. There is little evidence available on accessibility of exceptions to ‘digital only’ applications. While governments frequently argue that digitalisation frees up resources for more complex human support services, concrete evidence of this reallocation remains conspicuously absent. Moreover, the erosion of human interaction in social protection systems carries hidden costs: it can diminish empathy between social protection employees and those seeking support, and eliminates crucial opportunities for referral to additional services and holistic support that human caseworkers can provide.

The decreasing human involvement in benefit assessments points toward an even more fundamental challenge: the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making systems. When algorithms replace social protection employees, the basis for decisions can become opaque, and the pathways to contest unfavourable outcomes grow increasingly unclear. People facing rejection may find themselves confronting an impenetrable black box, unable to understand why their application failed or how to effectively appeal.

Monitoring whether automated decisions include clear information about how determinations were made, whom to contact for clarification, and how to contest outcomes has become paramount. Yet European legal systems have witnessed troubling examples where algorithm source codes are withheld from scrutiny on grounds of data protection, security concerns, or developer copyright claims. While courts are beginning to push back—Spain’s Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that source codes (demanded by an NGO in 2018) cannot be withheld from public authorities on intellectual property grounds—securing such transparency remains a slow, litigative process that depends heavily on robust civil society organisations and an independent judiciary.

The risks extend to mechanisms ostensibly designed to facilitate access. Digital mandates that allow one person to engage with systems on another’s behalf can enhance accessibility but introduce critical dangers of autonomy loss and potential abuse for people in vulnerable situations. These risks become particularly acute when mandates are granted solely based on digital inability, or when social protection systems share access codes with banking systems, as occurs in Finland, Poland, and Sweden. Such mandates, while convenient for some, creates new vulnerabilities for those least equipped to protect themselves from digital exploitation.

Perhaps the most insidious structural weakness of digital procedures lies in their design philosophy: optimised for common cases, they systematically fail those whose circumstances deviate from the norm. Individuals with complex employment histories—such as those simultaneously working as employees and self-employed contractors—discover that automated pension simulators simply cannot process their situations. Parents whose children are born abroad, workers without standard employment contracts, or families where the non-default parent needs to receive benefits in some Member States find themselves excluded from otherwise streamlined benefit registration processes for child allowances or maternity support.

This digital streamlining threatens to create a two-tier welfare system: seamless, instant access for those whose lives fit neatly into predetermined categories, and an administrative nightmare—if not outright exclusion—for anyone whose circumstances are complex or atypical. Without robust mechanisms to identify when digital procedures fail to capture individual situations and to provide immediate referral to qualified human support, digitalisation becomes an instrument of systematic exclusion rather than inclusion.

The deployment of digital tools in social protection has been conspicuously skewed toward identifying fraud and over-payment rather than addressing under-take-up, where people entitled to benefits fail to receive the benefits they desperately need. This imbalance reveals uncomfortable truths about institutional priorities and deserves urgent correction. A genuine commitment to social inclusion demands that policymakers investigate and expand the use of digital tools to automatically identify and enrol people who are entitled to benefits but not receiving them.

The increasing prevalence of automated benefit receipt, which eliminates the need for applications entirely, represents a welcome development in this direction. However, even these proactive systems require careful monitoring to ensure that groups in the most vulnerable situations—such as those experiencing homelessness who may not appear in standard databases—do not slip through the digital cracks. The promise of digital inclusion rings hollow if it systematically excludes those who need support most urgently.

The digitalisation of Europe’s social protection systems appears unstoppable, driven by compelling promises of financial sustainability, administrative efficiency, and improved accessibility. Yet the current trajectory risks creating a system that achieves efficiency at the expense of equity, and delivers speed at the cost of human empathy and meaningful support.

The challenge confronting policymakers extends far beyond celebrating the mere existence of online applications and digital interfaces. What’s urgently needed is rigorous, continuous monitoring of non-digital support accessibility, algorithmic transparency, and the protection of rights for people in atypical situations. Only through such vigilance can Europe ensure that its digital revolution serves those in vulnerable situations rather than merely streamlining administrative processes. The true measure of a digitalised welfare state lies not only in its efficiency metrics or cost savings, but also in its capacity to reach and support every person who needs it—especially those whom digital systems are most likely to leave behind.