MPs join activists and families in call for public inquiry into years of DWP deaths

MPs have joined disabled activists and bereaved families in calling for a public inquiry into the years of deaths linked to the actions of ministers, senior civil servants and advisers at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Disability News Service (DNS) has shown how the department spent more than a decade covering up evidence that links its actions with hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths of disabled social security claimants.

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

Much of the evidence is included in the book The Department*, written by DNS editor John Pring and published in August.

Next week, DNS plans to bring together key evidence from the book, as well as important new information secured since The Department went to press, in a detailed explanation of why a public inquiry is needed.

This week, MPs joined the fight to persuade the government to order a public inquiry through an early day motion (EDM) tabled by John McDonnell, the former Labour shadow chancellor, who currently sits as an independent MP and has supported the disabled people’s anti-cuts movement for more than a decade.

He focuses in his EDM on the book’s “shocking evidence” of harm caused by the work capability assessment (WCA).

Among that evidence is research by public health experts from the universities of Liverpool and Oxford, who showed in 2015 that, across England, the reassessment through the WCA of disabled people receiving the old incapacity benefit was associated with an extra 590 suicides between 2010 and 2013.

McDonnell calls in the EDM for the government to set up an independent public inquiry into the role played by ministers, civil servants and advisers “and their culpability for the suffering” identified in Pring’s book.

So far, the EDM has been signed by five other MPs: Labour’s Jon Trickett, Mary Kelly Foy and Ian Lavery, SDLP’s Claire Hanna, and DUP’s Jim Shannon.

McDonnell said on Tuesday, at a vigil outside the Royal Courts of Justice, that it was “difficult to describe the scale of the suffering” caused by the WCA, including “tragically, a large number of disabled people losing their lives”. 

Disabled people and allies were taking part in the vigil as a two-day high court hearing began into a case taken by disabled activist and author Ellen Clifford that challenges proposals by the last government to tighten the WCA (see separate stories), which have yet to be ruled out by the new government.

Disabled activist Rick Burgess, who helped persuade the Oxford and Liverpool academics to carry out the 2015 research, said: “A responsible government would actually want to learn what had gone wrong. 

“A public inquiry is an ideal way of doing that, a democratic way of doing that, a transparent way of doing that.”

Mark Harrison, from the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance of disabled people’s organisations, said an inquiry was “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”.

Families whose relatives died due to DWP’s actions are also backing the call for a public inquiry.

Joy Dove, whose daughter Jodey Whiting took her own life in February 2017, 15 days after her employment and support allowance was wrongly stopped by DWP for missing a WCA, has been calling for an inquiry for more than five years.

She said: “We need to find out who was responsible for what happened.

“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.”

Alison Burton, whose father-in-law Errol Graham starved to death after DWP wrongly stopped his benefits when he missed a WCA, said the families of those who died are being denied justice.    

She believes a public inquiry would learn lessons and provide the transparency necessary to stop the “public misconceptions about people who are on the benefits system” and reduce “the hate created by the previous government”.

Imogen Day, whose sister Philippa’s death was caused by widespread flaws and failings in the personal independence payment assessment system, said an inquiry was “sorely needed” because of the “sheer amount of deaths” and serious harm caused to claimants.

She said: “If we don’t find out how it happened, we are not going to find out how to stop it, how to prevent it ever happening again.”

Dr China Mills, who leads Healing Justice Ldn’s Deaths by Welfare project – which uses a digital timeline to track the slow, accumulated violence caused by the social security system over the last three decades – said: “Thanks to the ongoing investigations of Disability News Service we know there have been hundreds of investigations into serious harm and deaths (internal process reviews), 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.” 

Another to call for a public inquiry is Dr Jay Watts, a consultant clinical psychologist and disabled activist, who has played a crucial role in highlighting the impact of DWP’s actions over the last decade.

She believes an inquiry is “essential” and that DWP’s “unrelenting assault on disabled and claimant communities” has damaged hundreds of thousands of lives, “reducing them to a state of hypervigilant anxiety and despair”. 

She said 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”. 

DWP had failed to comment on the EDM and the call for a public inquiry by noon on the 12th of December.

Credit for this article goes to the Disability News Service