DWP hides truth from coroner on exactly what happened in lead-up to Jodey Whiting’s suicide

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has hidden the truth from a coroner about its role in a disabled woman’s suicide, allowing ministers to avoid having to explain how they would prevent more benefit claimants taking their own lives.

Helga Swidenbank, DWP’s director for accessibility, disability services and disputes resolution, was chosen by the department to give evidence on its behalf this week in the long-awaited second inquest into the death of Jodey Whiting in February 2017.

The inquest found that DWP’s wrongful decision to stop Whiting’s benefits – along with a string of safeguarding failures – was the “trigger” for her to take her own life.

Coroner Clare Bailey found that Whiting’s “deteriorating” state of mental health had been “precipitated” by the withdrawal of her out-of-work disability benefits (see separate story).

But Swidenbank’s evidence helped persuade Bailey not to write a prevention of future deaths (PFD) report, which would have obliged DWP to explain in writing how it would prevent further such tragedies.

During the inquest, Swidenbank, who only joined DWP in 2022, failed to answer key questions from barrister Jesse Nicholls, who was representing Whiting’s family.

DWP has refused to tell the family, and their legal team, whether it ever carried out a secret internal process review (IPR) into the circumstances leading up to the death, even though its guidance suggests it almost certainly will have done so.

But when Swidenbank was asked by Nicholls on Monday to confirm if an IPR was carried out into Whiting’s death, she said she didn’t know and would have to ask colleagues.

During Monday’s inquest, at Middlesbrough’s Teesside Justice Centre, Swidenbank declined to comment several times when asked key questions about Whiting’s case and the procedures in place at the time of her death.

Asked why both DWP and Maximus – the private sector contractor paid to carry out work capability assessments – had failed to deal with Whiting’s request for a work capability assessment to be carried out in her home, she said: “I’m not able to comment on that.”

Asked by Nicholls if anyone had ever asked the DWP decision-makers and call-handlers who dealt with Whiting’s benefit claim “how this happened”, she said she didn’t know.

And asked if DWP had identified if there were problems at the time with the “decision-makers’ guide” – the guidance for DWP staff who make decisions on benefit claims – she said: “I can’t comment on that.”

Swidenbank said she believed there had been a “culture shift” within DWP since 2017 towards becoming “much more compassionate” rather than being “process-driven” at the time of Whiting’s death, although she said the department still had “more work to do”.

She said DWP was “deeply sorry” for its failings at the time, and accepted the findings of an Independent Case Examiner report that found in 2019 that the department had failed five times to follow its own safeguarding rules in the weeks leading up to her death.

Swidenbank also said DWP had launched new customer experience standards – which were set up in 2023 – to “test how our teams are working”.

But she failed to tell the inquest that an internal survey last year of how they were being applied found that DWP staff were failing in two out of five cases to meet those standards.

Jonathan Dixey, the barrister representing DWP, said there was “a lot of work going on” within the department, including a public consultation on whether DWP should have a statutory safeguarding duty.

He said the department accepted that further improvements could be made, and that it would be responding to a new report by the Commons work and pensions select committee on “safeguarding vulnerable claimants” within DWP.

But Nicholls later told the coroner that even though it was more than eight years since Jodey Whiting’s death, there were a “substantial” number of matters that caused “ongoing concern” about the risk of future deaths linked to DWP.

He said: “There still remains ongoing concerns about the risks of vulnerable benefits claimants dying on the termination of their benefits and related processes.”

He said a number of Swidenbank’s replies were either that an answer was “not one that I can give you” or that DWP was “awaiting the outcome of the department’s response to the select committee’s investigation”.

He said: “That is not a basis for not making a PFD report. Quite the opposite.”

But Bailey told Monday’s inquest that she would not be sending a PFD report to DWP.

She said she had heard of “many changes” made by DWP since Whiting’s death, and had been told that actions were still being taken, with new structures being put in place “to support vulnerable claimants”.

And she said the committee’s report would be “keeping this issue front and central for the DWP”.

She said that for these reasons she believed “sufficient steps will be taken”, so there was no need to write a PFD report.

Bailey is not the first coroner to be convinced by DWP’s insistence in a court hearing that it is already addressing failures that have caused the death of a disabled claimant.

Six years ago, two senior DWP civil servants persuaded a coroner not to write a PFD report following the death of Errol Graham – who starved to death when DWP wrongly stopped his out-of-work disability benefits – after providing her with misleading information about a safeguarding review.

More than a decade of evidence now links the department with hundreds – and probably thousands – of suicides and other deaths of claimants.

Bailey was probably unaware that DWP’s chief medical adviser had told MPs in January that PFD reports are crucial in persuading DWP to act on safeguarding issues.

Dr Gail Allsopp said in January that she focuses on PFDs – rather than IPRs – when it comes to learning lessons from suicides and other deaths.

*The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, DNS editor John Pring’s book on the years of deaths linked to DWP, including those of Jodey Whiting and Errol Graham, is published by Pluto Press

**The following organisations are among those that might be able to offer support if you have been affected by the issues raised in this article:  Mind, Papyrus, Rethink, Samaritans, and SOS Silence of Suicide

Credit for this article goes to John Pring with the Disability News Service