The equality watchdog was first told by a senior member of staff six years ago that it needed to launch an inquiry into deaths linked to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Disability News Service (DNS) can reveal.

But despite being shown significant evidence that the work capability assessment process and the sanctions system were linked with multiple deaths of disabled people claiming benefits, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) refused to act.

Instead, senior figures spent months discussing a proposal for an inquiry, and asking for that proposal to be redrafted.

A former senior EHRC staff member has told DNS this week that an inquiry was “never prioritised” by the commission when it clearly should have been.

DNS has spoken to Julie Jarman, who led on EHRC’s social security policy between November 2017 and March 2019, before later becoming its head of strategy.

It was her idea, after she joined EHRC, to launch an inquiry into deaths linked to DWP’s assessments and sanctions, particularly those claimants who had taken their own lives.

She believes the commission had all the evidence it needed to launch an inquiry in 2018, and that it could have forced DWP to produce secret reports that would have exposed the multiple flaws in the system that have continued to lead to deaths over the last six years.

Among that evidence would have been the secret peer reviews (later renamed internal process reviews) that DWP carries out when its actions are associated with the death of a claimant.

Between 2012 and 2022, DWP carried out more than 250 of these reviews, each of them written by DWP civil servants with access to the detailed circumstances in which a claimant had died.

The commission would have been able to analyse these reviews, as well as reports by coroners, evidence from families of those who died, and testimony from DWP civil servants and ministers.

Jarman said: “We knew about the peer reviews, and we knew we would have been able to access them. 

“A statutory inquiry has a right to access that material.”

But Jarman told DNS that when she produced a written proposal to carry out an inquiry, she was repeatedly asked to redraft it.

She said: “I kept rewriting it and it kept being tossed backwards and forwards, and I would reword it again. 

“At that time, that’s what they did if they didn’t really want to do something but they couldn’t find a good reason not to do it.”

She was never told that this was due to pressure from the Conservative government – which had by then appointed all the commission’s board members, and its chair – but she told DNS that senior staff were “nervous about rocking the boat”.

She said she was “really concerned” at the time because she knew from the evidence – much of it produced by DNS – that the links between DWP and the deaths of claimants were clear and needed full investigation.

Asked by DNS if an inquiry should have been prioritised by the commission in 2018, she said: “Of course it should have been. People were dying.”

In early 2019, the commission scrapped its work on social security, the area Jarman had been recruited to work on, and she moved instead into work on transport and education policy, before becoming the commission’s head of strategy.

EHRC was then prompted to look again at a possible inquiry in early 2020 after DNS reported on the death of Errol Graham, who starved to death after his employment and support allowance was wrongly stopped by DWP.

A few months later, the Covid pandemic meant EHRC had to put plans for an inquiry on hold and focus on health and social care, including the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on disabled people and other groups, such as people from an ethnic minority.

Jarman’s evidence means EHRC was being asked to launch an inquiry by its own policy expert a year before it began to receive letters from Labour MP Debbie Abrahams in 2019 to ask it to investigate deaths linked to its disability assessment processes. 

It also confirms the commission’s continuing resistance to launching a proper, in-depth inquiry into the years of deaths linked to DWP’s actions and systems.

Jarman was a delegate to last month’s Labour party conference.

She asked Sir Stephen Timms, the party’s new social security and disability minister, at a conference fringe event if he believed there should be an independent regulator and service standards for the social security system, taking the role that Ofsted plays in education.

She told DNS this week that there was a shocking contrast between the expectations of service-users in the NHS and education and those in social security.

She said: “You have a sense that they have a duty to provide you with as good a service as they can – and that they have a duty of care – in education and the NHS, and that is simply not the case when it comes to welfare.”

Jarman welcomed the commission’s decision, earlier this year, finally to launch an investigation into DWP’s alleged unlawful treatment of benefit claimants under the Equality Act through the way it carries out work capability assessments and assessments for personal independence payment.

But she said: “The shame is that this could and should have been done six years ago, and action taken then might have prevented subsequent deaths.”

After seeing Jarman’s evidence, Linda Burnip, co-founder of Disabled People Against Cuts, told DNS: “It is disgusting that a commission supposed to protect the human rights of disabled people behaved in such an underhand way to avoid investigating deaths caused by DWP’s actions. 

“They really aren’t fit for purpose.”

Mark Harrison, a member of the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (ROFA) steering group, said: “ROFA has been demanding the EHRC takes legal action against the DWP for the last four years for benefit-related deaths.  

“Instead of taking decisive action to prevent more unnecessary and preventable deaths the EHRC have fobbed us off saying they were negotiating a section 23 agreement with DWP.  

“We believed this was nothing more than a smokescreen for doing nothing and preventing any information being released.  

“We suspected that the DWP would never sign such an agreement, we told the EHRC this, and we have been proved right.

“This demonstrates that the EHRC cannot be trusted to protect the rights of disabled people.  

“We need a complete reset of our equalities legislation and accountable bodies.   

“We need an independent human rights organisation which actually holds government to account.  

“The jury is very much out if we will see any change in the EHRC or the DWP or progress under the new Labour administration.”

Activists have criticised the commission because the investigation it launched earlier this year will not take evidence from families, and it will only focus on events from January 2021 onwards.

The focus on just the last three-and-a-half years will mean the investigation may not consider evidence relating to some of the most high-profile and disturbing deaths linked to DWP’s failures, such as those of Philippa Day (September 2019), Jodey Whiting (February 2017), Michael O’Sullivan (September 2013), Roy Curtis (November 2018) and Errol Graham (spring 2018). 

And it is also likely to mean a focus on the actions of just three work and pensions secretaries: Therese Coffey, Chloe Smith (who was in post for less than two months in 2022) and Mel Stride, who was in post at the time of July’s general election. 

EHRC refused to comment this week on its failure to launch an inquiry in 2018, or on whether it regretted failing to act at the time.

But an EHRC spokesperson said in a statement: “In May 2024 we launched an investigation into the Department for Work and Pensions, due to concerns that the department may be failing to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people with learning disabilities or long-term mental health conditions during health assessment determinations. 

“We are also assessing the department’s compliance with the public sector equality duty using our powers under section 31 of the Equality Act 2006.

“The investigation’s call for evidence closed in August and our investigators are now carefully assessing all the evidence received. 

“We are grateful to all those that shared their evidence with us.

“As an independent and evidence-led regulator, we have a duty to assess all the information available to us. 

“An investigation is the strongest possible action we can take and is not undertaken lightly. 

“We have been working on this matter for a number of years, but in line with section six of the Equality Act 2006, details of our interactions with the DWP prior to and during the investigation are confidential.”

*The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, John Pring’s book on the deaths linked to DWP, is published by Pluto Press 

Credit for this article goes to the Disability News Service