DWP must take urgent safety steps on large payments, says coroner after suicide, five years on from earlier inquest warning

A coroner has told the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to take urgent safety measures following the suicide of a man who became paranoid after suddenly receiving £5,000 in benefit arrears, five years after a similar call by another coroner.

Richard Brookes took his own life on 25 January, just weeks after DWP paid the first instalment of the £37,000 they owed him into his bank account.

Coroner Anna Morris has now told DWP, in the latest of a series of prevention of future deaths (PFD) reports sent to the department by coroners over the last 15 years, that she believes its safeguarding processes in such situations are flawed.

When it was asked to respond to the report this week, DWP provided a deeply misleading background note to Disability News Service, claiming wrongly that the coroner had said DWP followed its processes correctly.

The coroner’s report comes five years after another coroner sent a similar PFD report to DWP, following the death of Alexander Boamah, who had also died soon after receiving a large payment of benefits arrears. 

That coroner wrote in 2019 of “the potential that individuals, without capacity to manage their finances, may come into receipt of funds which place them at particular risk”, with DWP subsequently promising to update policy and guidance “to ensure necessary safeguards are in place”.

This month’s inquest into the death of Richard Brookes shows DWP failed to introduce the “necessary safeguards” to prevent further deaths.

The inquest heard that after the £5,000 appeared in Brookes’s account on 8 December 2023, he became paranoid about the source of the money, and sent text messages to his sister in the days before his death which indicated he did not know where the funds had come from.

Brookes, who appears to have lived in the Stockport area of Greater Manchester, had a diagnosis of possible paranoid schizophrenia and was taking antipsychotic medication at the time he received the money.

Morris said it appeared that a call to him from DWP was either not understood fully or fed into a period of “delusional thinking”.

Under DWP’s Guidance for Making Large Payments, he should have received a call from DWP’s customer experience and advanced support team (CEAST), to assess how best to make the payment.

But there is no record of the content of that conversation, and what steps were put in place to ensure he understood what he was being told.

The arrears had started to mount up in 2016 when he was transferred from disability living allowance to personal independence payment, but did not receive the severe disability payment he was entitled to on top of his employment and support allowance.

It was not until last November that DWP spotted the error, and calculated he was owed over £37,000 in arrears that had built up over those seven years.

The coroner concluded that Brookes had intended to take his own life.

In her PFD report, sent to DWP, she said she believed there was “a risk that future deaths will occur unless action is taken”.

She said DWP had made “a large payment of money to a vulnerable adult who was then required to self-manage that money. 

“In these situations, it is important that there are robust systems in place for ensuring that the requisite assessments and checks are made of an individual to ensure that large payments can be made in a way that does not increase any vulnerability.”

But she said evidence showed that payments can be made “without there being a full note on the system of the content of the call with the individual”.

She added: “I am therefore concerned that there is no way that an agent, quality assessor or team leader can properly evaluate whether any agreement made between the DWP and an individual regarding repayment has fully considered all the relevant factors regarding their vulnerabilities before a large payment is made.”

But she also said DWP did not appear to be able to audit its other large payments to check whether similar failures had happened in any of those cases.

DWP will now have to respond to the coroner’s report.

When asked for its response to the report, why it did not appear to have implemented the changes recommended by the coroner in 2019, and why there was no recording of the CEAST call, DWP incorrectly stated that new processes introduced after Alexander Boamah’s death were followed and that coroner Anna Morris had noted this in her report.

DNS pointed out that this was deeply misleading because what Morris had said in her report was that it was “not possible to evaluate what was said, how long the call took and what steps were put in place to ensure that Rick understood the information within the call”.

She also said that it was “not possible to assess what Rick was asked about his state of mind, any vulnerabilities he was experiencing and his ability to safely manage the receipt of large payments of money”.

DWP also said that not all calls to and from the department are recorded, and it claimed that if a call recording had existed, it would have been submitted as evidence to the inquest.

A DWP spokesperson said in a statement: “Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Mr Brookes.

“We will review the coroner’s report and respond in due course.”

John McArdle, co-founder of Black Triangle Campaign, said: “This is yet another tragic case of a death that could have been avoided had the department heeded the recommendations of PFD reports issued by coroners over the past 15 years. 

“It is simply unacceptable that in spite of DWP’s protestations to the contrary, the same errors are made time and time again and disabled people are dying as a result. 

“We consider that these systemic failures constitute a grave and systematic violation of disabled people’s human rights, in particular the right to life. 

“The department must be held accountable for this trail of bureaucratic violence and neglect. 

“It is now crystal clear to all that the department is incapable of self-regulation in fulfilling even a minimum duty of, and standard of, care to severely disabled people that we are entitled to require from a public authority. 

“It is simply not fit for purpose. 

“We submit that the only way forward to ensure that this duty of care is discharged is to establish an independent inspectorate, perhaps similar in form to Ofsted or the General Medical Council. 

“As a precursor, [there must be] a full public inquiry into the department’s appalling litany of failures, leading to countless deaths of disabled people over the past 15 years. 

“This inquiry requires to be urgently and immediately constituted to establish all the facts surrounding these tragic deaths and to work at pace to address the issue of how a DWP inspectorate can best operate to prevent further tragedies such as this one from ever happening again.”

Credit for this article goes to the Disability News Service