DWP hides historic ‘fitness for work’ papers from National Archives

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has stopped sending key records from a crucial period in the history of disability benefit reform to The National Archives so they can be viewed by researchers.

Under the Public Records Act, government departments have to identify documents of “historical value” and transfer them to The National Archives by the time they are 20 years old.

But DWP has not sent any records relating to papers seen and signed by ministers and senior civil servants for more than three years, with the last batch of records only covering documents up to and including 2002.

The missing records are likely to cover the early years in the development of employment and support allowance (ESA) and the work capability assessment (WCA), which were both introduced in 2008.

In the years following 2008, the WCA process was associated with hundreds, and probably thousands, of suicides and other deaths of disabled people seeking out-of-work disability benefits.

A spokesperson for The National Archives confirmed this week that the last transfer of records from DWP in relation to “’ministers and senior officers’ papers” was in 2020 and covered records up to 2002.

The National Archives made it clear that it is government departments that decide which documents are sent to the archives, and when, and that it plays no part in those decisions.

Other major government departments, including the Home Office, the Treasury – which provided former chancellor Gordon Brown’s private office papers – the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Prime Minister’s Office, have all sent records from 2003 to The National Archives.

DWP declined to produce a statement but claimed it had provided all relevant files to The National Archives.

Records previously released to The National Archives have shown how the “bureaucratic violence” of the Department of Social Security (which later became DWP) grew slowly during the 1990s through the actions of ministers and senior civil servants who devised the all work test, a forerunner of the WCA, which was introduced in 1995.

The documents are detailed in The Department*, a new book by Disability News Service editor John Pring, which describes how DWP later spent years covering up evidence of the links between its actions and the deaths of claimants.

Among the records were documents that showed how civil servants plotted to sideline GPs from their central role in the process of determining fitness for work. 

A memo from 1992 showed how Conservative social security secretary Peter Lilley first told civil servants that he wanted to know more about how the insurance industry approached “sickness insurance”.

Another memo, from April 1993, described how ministers insisted that the new incapacity benefit – which was introduced in 1995 alongside the all work test – should “cost substantially less”, while the department should “aim to create an environment which encourages greater private sector provision”.

Other documents later revealed that the Department of Social Security was told of three deaths in late 1996 and early 1997 that were closely linked to the new all work test.

It is likely that key documents seen by Labour ministers and senior civil servants from 2003 onwards will include similar revelations concerning the initial development of the WCA and ESA.

Although the records that have been held back by DWP relate to decisions taken under the Labour government, the department’s decision to prevent them being sent to the National Archives was made under the last Conservative government. 

Credit for this article goes to the Disability News Service