Deaths, lies and cover-ups: the case for a public inquiry into the ‘unthinkable cost’ of DWP’s systemic violence

Senior civil servants and ministers spent more than a decade covering up evidence that links the actions of a government department with hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths of disabled people who relied on the social security system.

Documents secured through freedom of information requests, inquest reports, and investigations by bereaved family members show how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) destroyed incriminating records, failed to share crucial evidence with its own independent reviewers and grieving relatives, and even lied to a coroner.

Disabled activists and families of those who have died say it is now time for a statutory public inquiry into the deaths, DWP’s systemic failings, and the years of cover-up.

Calls for an inquiry into the actions of DWP and misconduct by senior civil servants and ministers began more than five years ago.

But while there have been inquiries into the infected blood and Post Office scandals, the Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in Salisbury, the deaths of mental health inpatients in Essex, and the Omagh bombing, successive governments have stubbornly resisted calls to examine how a single department could have caused so many deaths of disabled people who relied on the social security system.

Disabled people like Stephen Carré.

After years working in high-pressure jobs for electronics and communications companies, Stephen had become very unwell, stopped working, and shut himself off from society for two years at his Bedfordshire home, living off his savings. 

He was eventually persuaded by his family to apply for employment and support allowance (ESA), the Labour government’s new out-of-work disability benefit, and was put through DWP’s work capability assessment (WCA) process. After an assessment by a doctor from outsourcing giant Atos, DWP found him fit for work. Neither Atos nor DWP had contacted his GP, his community psychiatric nurse, or his consultant psychiatrist, to ask for evidence of his mental ill-health.

Stephen took his own life early in January 2010, after DWP rejected his appeal. 

The coroner at his inquest found the trigger for his suicide was his being found fit for work. He was so concerned that he wrote a prevention of future deaths (PFD) report, in which he called on DWP to seek advice from claimants’ mental health specialists as part of the WCA. 

The PFD report was awaiting the new Conservative work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, following the May 2010 general election. But instead of acting on the report, Duncan Smith stuck with his plan to apply the WCA to 1.6 million incapacity benefit claimants, many of whom had long-term mental ill-health and had been receiving those benefits for many years. 

Duncan Smith and his employment minister, Chris Grayling, also failed to show the report to Professor Malcolm Harrington, the expert they had appointed to lead the first of five annual reviews of the WCA. Even without seeing the coroner’s letter, Harrington believed the WCA process – introduced in late 2008 – was not ready to be rolled out more widely. But Duncan Smith and Grayling rejected his advice, an error that would cause hundreds of deaths.

DWP all but ignored the PFD report, making only a minor change to the guidance for Atos assessors. The flaws at the heart of the WCA remained, and a precedent for covering-up evidence of the links between the assessment process and claimant deaths had been set. 

A succession of deaths linked to the deeply-flawed WCA and a raft of social security cuts and reforms would come to public attention in the post-2010 austerity years, but it was not until the autumn of 2014 that DWP finally admitted – after originally denying their existence – that it had been carrying out secret reviews into many of these deaths. These ‘peer reviews’ were never shared with the families of those who died, who were not even told reviews were taking place.

DWP also hid peer reviews of deaths linked to the WCA from Professor Harrington and Dr Paul Litchfield, the independent expert who carried out the fourth and fifth reviews of the WCA in 2013 and 2014. And it failed to show Litchfield a second PFD report linking DWP and the WCA with a suicide, following the death of another disabled claimant, Michael O’Sullivan, in September 2013.

DWP fought attempts by Disability News Service (DNS) to obtain the peer reviews through freedom of information requests, and when the information rights tribunal eventually ordered it to release only the recommendations made by the reviews, they showed that at least 16 of the probes had mentioned the WCA, ESA or the reassessment process.  

It was not until November 2015 that academic research demonstrated how the 2010 decision by Duncan Smith and Grayling to roll out the WCA had caused many hundreds of deaths.  

Public health experts from the universities of Liverpool and Oxford showed that for every 10,000 incapacity benefit claimants who were reassessed through the WCA in England between 2010 and 2013, there were an additional six suicides. Across England, this reassessment process was ‘associated with’ an extra 590 suicides. 

As well as helping persuade the academics to carry out this research, disabled activist Rick Burgess has personal experience of the WCA, and has witnessed years of harm caused by DWP. He is convinced of the need for a public inquiry, so the experiences of those who lost their lives, the survivors, and the friends and family of those affected, can be acknowledged. ‘We were terrorised by the state and some people didn’t survive,’ he says. ‘It’s also about justice. We are owed justice.’

Such an inquiry would not only expose the evidence that has already emerged to greater public scrutiny, it would also provide an opportunity to take evidence in public from ministers and current and former DWP civil servants and advisers, and secure many of the reviews and other documents that DWP has kept secret over the last 15 years. Without such an inquiry, much of this evidence will never be seen outside the department, and many of those responsible for the years of cover-up, negligence and fatal recklessness will never be held to account for their actions.

Mark Harrison, from the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance of disabled people’s organisations, believes an inquiry ‘is essential if we are to understand what has gone so horribly wrong in the DWP that has led to so many unnecessary benefit-related deaths. 

‘Only independent scrutiny can uncover the links between different parts of the system, so we know how to fix it to prevent future tragedies on this scale.’

One of the strongest pieces of evidence of how DWP covered-up its role in so many deaths has emerged following the suicide of Michael O’Sullivan, from north London. 

He had been claiming incapacity benefit (IB) since 2000, due to depression, social anxiety, agoraphobia, and general anxiety disorder. He was one of hundreds of thousands of IB claimants reassessed for the new ESA. His assessment lasted just 12 minutes and left him ‘humiliated, mortified, and feeling like a criminal’. After he was declared fit for work, he began experiencing severe anxiety and panic attacks.

He was ordered to attend a two-week training course and at the end of the first week, severely traumatised by the experience, he tried to end his own life. He was deemed unfit for work for six months by his GP but was called for another WCA four months later.

During this new assessment process, both Atos and DWP failed to seek evidence from any of Michael’s doctors, including his GP, psychiatrist, and clinical psychologist. The assessment lasted just 21 minutes, and the assessor concluded that he was ‘at no significant risk by working’. He was placed on jobseeker’s allowance and applied for countless jobs; he was eventually told to attend a job placement on a demolition site. After washing and ironing five shirts for the week ahead, he took his own life on 23 September 2013.

The following January, coroner Mary Hassell ruled that the ‘trigger’ for his suicide was being found fit for work. Just as another coroner had done four years earlier after Stephen Carré’s death, Hassell concluded that there was ‘a risk that future deaths will occur unless action is taken’, and she sent DWP a prevention of future deaths report.

The O’Sullivan family have worked for more than a decade to uncover the truth about Michael’s death, with support from their MP, Sir Keir Starmer, and the late Nick Dilworth, a campaigning welfare rights activist. They obtained an internal DWP email, sent on 5 February 2014, in which the minister for disabled people, Mike Penning, was told about Hassell’s report. 

DWP guidance said that all records relating to a claimant’s suicide should be kept for six years. Other DWP guidance stated: ‘Where suicide is associated with DWP activity, a Peer Review must be undertaken.’ But the family were told in March 2017 by the then disability minister, Penny Mordaunt, that no peer review had been carried out because ‘much of the documentation’ had ‘been destroyed’ in accordance with DWP’s ‘records management policy’.

Penning has told me that he knew nothing about the records being destroyed. It was an ‘operational’ matter, he said, and ministers ‘are not involved in the day-to-day operational running of their Department or individual case management’. DWP has refused to comment, as has Mordaunt.

The O’Sullivans are certain DWP was responsible for their father’s death. They want a public inquiry to examine its cover-ups and how DWP’s actions are linked to Michael’s suicide, and countless other deaths. 

As the years passed, and DWP began to insist it was a ‘learning’ organisation, disabled people who relied on its social security safety net continued to die in ways closely associated with its policies and actions. 

One of them was Jodey Whiting, from Stockton-on-Tees. She took her own life in February 2017, 15 days after her ESA was wrongly stopped by DWP for missing a work capability assessment. She had been a long-time claimant of incapacity benefit, and then ESA, and DWP and its assessors had previously noted the severity of her mental distress, and the risk of harm if she was found fit for work, while they were aware of her long history of suicidal thoughts. 

Her mother, Joy Dove, has fought for years for a second inquest into her daughter’s death, after the first one failed to examine DWP’s role in her death or take evidence from any DWP witnesses. It lasted just 37 minutes.

Thanks to Joy’s years of campaigning and refusal to accept DWP’s half-truths and prevarication, the Court of Appeal ordered a second inquest into her daughter’s death. It is set to take place next summer. 

Joy has been calling for a public inquiry for more than five years. ‘We need to find out who was responsible for what happened,’ she says. ‘There have been inquiries into Hillsborough and the Post Office scandal. Now we need an inquiry into the deaths caused by DWP, including Jodey’s. 

‘DWP don’t want the truth to come out. People took their own lives and were also driven to the point of suicide. DWP should not be allowed to get away with it.’

Two years after Jodey’s suicide came the death of 27-year-old Philippa Day, from Nottingham. 

Philippa’s unconscious body had been found by her sister and father on 8 August 2019, just days after she had been told she would have to attend an assessment centre for a face-to-face appointment to help decide her personal independence payment (PIP) claim.

They had found her lying on her bed at her home in Nottingham. On the pillow next to her was the letter from DWP contractor Capita telling her she would have to attend the appointment at the assessment centre. She was taken to hospital but died after spending more than two months in a coma.

An inquest later heard how Philippa had experienced months of distress after DWP removed her disability benefits when it lost her claim form, and then delayed reinstating her benefits. Both DWP and Capita – which had been assessing Philippa’s eligibility on DWP’s behalf – had been told of her history of significant mental distress and mental health inpatient admissions, that she was agoraphobic, and that she would be unable to cope with attending an assessment centre.

The coroner, Gordon Clow, concluded that flaws in the disability benefits system were ‘the predominant factor and the only acute factor’ that led her to take her own life. Clow highlighted 28 separate ‘problems’ with the administration of the PIP system that helped cause her death. It took more than two hours for him to read out his conclusions, after a nine-day inquest that uncovered multiple failings by both DWP and Capita in the 11 months that led up to Philippa’s death.

Philippa’s sister Imogen, who has fought for justice for her sister and other DWP victims and survivors, says a public inquiry is ‘sorely needed’.

‘If we don’t find out how it happened,’ she says, ‘we are not going to find out how to stop it, how to prevent it ever happening again. The DWP need to learn from their mistakes.’

As the years passed, disabled people continued to die in ways that could only be blamed on the actions and policies of the department, which continued to do everything it could to hide evidence of those links.

Errol Graham, from Nottingham, had cut himself off from his family after he was briefly sectioned following a mental health crisis that left him delusional and paranoid. He failed to attend a face-to-face assessment, and DWP stopped his ESA and housing benefit in October 2017. Deprived of financial support, unable to seek help, he slowly starved to death. He weighed just four-and-a-half stone when his body was found on 20 June 2018 by bailiffs who had knocked down his front door to evict him. 

Over the following months, his daughter-in-law, Alison Burton, slowly pieced together what had happened, and alerted the coroner. But at the inquest, the documents from Errol’s last assessment, in 2014, had been left out of the evidence bundle by DWP. They would have shown his ‘active suicidal thoughts’ and how he was ‘hearing voices in his head all the time’. 

The coroner still concluded that the ‘safety net that should surround vulnerable people like Errol in our society had holes within it’. But she did not write a PFD report, because DWP had told her a review into its safeguarding procedures would be completed that autumn, with a report to follow. But when I later asked for that report, DWP told me the safeguarding work was ‘ongoing and will continue as a key part of continuous improvement and learning’, and that there was ‘no formal review team’. It added: ‘There is not a final report.’ 

But the cover-up did not end there. Nottingham City Safeguarding Adults Board commissioned a safeguarding review. When it was published last year, it was critical of DWP, but not damning. I soon discovered why. The department had not provided the documents from Errol’s 2014 WCA. Six months later, the review’s author published an addendum. It was much more critical of DWP and concluded that the department should not have stopped Errol’s benefits, while the 2014 information ‘should have raised sufficient flags’ to trigger ‘further enquiries with other agencies’. 

Alison told me that DWP’s behaviour in hiding the evidence had been no surprise to her. ‘If it is committed to improving its services and protecting its claimants, as it claims every time, why be deceitful?’ 

There is currently, after a six-year delay, an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission into DWP’s treatment of claimants, but it has not sought evidence from bereaved families and focuses only on events from January 2021 onwards. It will do no more than scrape the surface of the scandal, as will an inquiry by the Commons work and pensions committee, although the MPs’ inquiry has at least taken evidence from bereaved families. 

And now there is Iain Duncan Smith’s universal credit. 

The working-age benefit system was first introduced in April 2013, but it is only in the last few years that DWP has started to transfer disabled people onto the new system, a process that began to accelerate this September. Disabled activists have warned for years of the harm the system would cause, and those concerns are growing. 

Two coroners have sent PFDs to DWP, in November 2023 and February this year, following the deaths of Kevin Gale and Nazerine Anderson, while the PCS union has described universal credit as a ‘dangerously flawed system’ in which ‘the most vulnerable continue to slip through its cracks’. 

Two years ago, I was told how a disabled woman, Rebecca (not her real name), left traumatised by the daily demands of universal credit, had taken her own life. She had been told in a phone call to attend a jobcentre meeting. Seven days after the call, on 15 April 2022, she ended her life by suicide. 

Her mother, Debra (not her real name), has spent more than two years trying to obtain records showing DWP’s contact with her daughter. She and her son approached the local jobcentre in February 2023, 10 months after Rebecca’s death, to ask for recordings of calls between her and the jobcentre. They were told that all such calls were recorded. But Debra and her son never received the recordings, and when Debra’s MP contacted DWP to find out where they were, he was told they had ‘not been retained’. 

DWP’s rules say it must keep recordings of claimant calls for at least 14 months – and even longer if the claimant has taken their own life.  

‘I think the whole thing is a cover-up,’ Debra told me. ‘Why would you destroy recordings if there is nothing incriminating on them?’ She says there must be a public inquiry.

Despite suggestions from Sir Stephen Timms, Labour’s minister for social security and disability, that he wants DWP to become more transparent, the department is still hiding information about the deaths, including a 2022 report that contains ‘worst case scenario’ information about the impact of its errors, which it fears could have ‘a negative reputational impact’. The information commissioner ordered DWP to release the report, arguing there was a ‘strong public interest in understanding DWP’s approach to preventing future errors and safeguarding issues’, but DWP appealed, and the case will now be heard by a tribunal. Sir Stephen insists there are ‘good public interest reasons’ for refusing to release it.

As reports of harm and deaths continue to pile up, so too does evidence of DWP cover-up. And momentum may now be swinging again towards the need for a public inquiry. 

Earlier this month, an early day motion (EDM) calling for an inquiry was tabled by John McDonnell, Labour’s former shadow chancellor, who is currently sitting as an independent. He focuses in the EDM on the ‘shocking evidence’ of harm and deaths caused by the WCA and described in The Department*, a new book written by DNS editor John Pring.

Asked to respond to the calls for a public inquiry and the EDM, DWP has refused to comment, although the department claims that it conducts robust IPRs after deaths or serious harm caused to a claimant when its actions have not reached expected standards, so that it can learn how to improve its processes.

It also claims that it is cooperating with the work and pensions committee’s inquiry, and that it looks forward to receiving and responding to its report and recommendations.

Dr China Mills has spent years leading the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing Justice Ldn and researching people’s suicides linked to the social security system. She says she knows from her work that there is ‘ample evidence of how the DWP’s policies and practices harm people and lead to many people’s deaths’, but that there is ‘also so much evidence yet to be surfaced and seen’. 

‘One death is a death too many,’ she says, ‘and there are so many people who have died and whose names we are yet to know, and may never know, because of disabled people and families’ well-founded fears of the welfare system. 

‘Thanks to the ongoing investigations of Disability News Service we know there have been hundreds of investigations into serious harm and deaths (IPRs**), and yet these have never been made public, not even to the families of those who have died. 

‘I don’t believe we’ll find justice from unjust systems, and I don’t think an inquiry alone would deliver justice. But it’s an important step for many disabled people and bereaved families as a means to surface currently unseen evidence, to investigate the depth and scale of harm caused by the DWP, and to move us closer to building life-affirming welfare systems.’ 

Dr Jay Watts, a consultant clinical psychologist and disabled activist, has played a crucial role over the last few years in highlighting the impact of DWP’s actions on claimants, particularly on their mental health. She is another who believes a public inquiry is ‘essential’. 

‘Trauma is not just personal; it is deeply political,’ she says. ‘Some of the most insidious and far-reaching violence is inflicted by the state itself. The DWP’s unrelenting assault on disabled and claimant communities is a prime example of this, blighting hundreds of thousands of lives and reducing them to a state of hypervigilant anxiety and despair. For many, this has come at an unthinkable cost: death through neglect or desperation – a tragedy that many rightly call a democide.

‘Healing these wounds requires more than silence or superficial reforms. It begins only when three conditions are met: a firm assurance that this violence ends now, a recognition of the backcloth of ideas and policies that gave rise to it, and a public acknowledgment of the injury and subjugation inflicted.’

She says that the ‘truth and reconciliation process’ of a public inquiry ‘would begin to heal the deep fissures of distrust and fear between disabled communities and the state – not just to prevent further harm but by sewing these experiences into collective memory. 

‘This is not simply about individual healing; it is about restoring our shared humanity and ensuring that such systemic violence never happens again. Our collective mental health – and our very dignity – depend on it.’

The House of Commons library’s briefing on statutory public inquiries says they are set up by government ministers to ‘respond to events of major public concern or to consider controversial public policy issues’. Only government ministers can establish a statutory inquiry, and they differ from other inquiries because they can force witnesses to provide evidence, and they keep clearer limits on government involvement.

The Department for Work and Pensions has caused the deaths of hundreds, and probably thousands, of disabled people over the last 15 years. It hid evidence linking its actions with those deaths from the two men it commissioned to review the work capability assessment; and from a coroner; and from the author of a safeguarding review; and from the families of those who died. It destroyed evidence linking its actions with at least two deaths. It took decisions it knew would put countless lives at risk, despite expert advice. It persistently failed – refused – to make its assessment processes safe, and to address the hostile culture within the department. It refused to even tell the families of those who died or suffered serious harm that it had carried out secret reviews into what had happened, and it continues to prevent these families from seeing those reports, unless forced to do so by judges or coroners.

This is what we know from just a handful of cases I have examined in depth over the last decade. Because so few of these deaths have been examined in depth by anyone outside DWP, there will be many, many more cases where DWP would have serious questions to answer about its actions, often involving the deaths of disabled people who had no friends of family to fight for justice for them after they died. The sheer scale of what might be exposed is clear. 

There may be the slightest signs of a change of approach under the new government, but even if it follows that path, it will never erase the horror and collective trauma of the last 15 years. We need a public inquiry.

*The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, by John Pring, is published by Pluto Press 

**Internal process reviews, formerly known as peer reviews

Credit for this article goes to the Disability News Service