MPs reopen inquiry into DWP safeguarding failures that led to countless deaths

Relatives of disabled people whose deaths were caused by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have welcomed the decision by a committee of MPs to relaunch an inquiry into the department’s years of safeguarding failures.

The Commons work and pensions committee announced this week that it had reopened an inquiry that had to be abandoned in May when the government called a general election.

The Safeguarding Vulnerable Claimants inquiry was set up to examine whether DWP has a duty to safeguard “vulnerable people”, and if it does not, whether it should.

The committee says the reopened inquiry will now “seek to understand how the new government intends to rise to the challenge of ensuring it supports those who find it difficult to interact with the benefit system”.

The committee’s inquiry received 78 pieces of written evidence, and held four oral evidence sessions, with evidence received from families of disabled people whose deaths were caused by DWP’s actions, disabled claimants, disabled people’s organisations, lawyers, academics, safeguarding and welfare rights experts, ministers, and charities.

It was the first serious public investigation into DWP safeguarding since reports of deaths linked to the department’s actions first began emerging in the early years of the 2010-15 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

As part of the inquiry, the committee carried out a survey of DWP staff, which found that two-thirds of them still do not have enough time to deal with safeguarding concerns “carefully” and “correctly”, despite years of deaths of benefit claimants linked with DWP’s failings.

The inquiry was launched in July 2023 when the committee was chaired by Labour MP Sir Stephen Timms, who is now minister for social security and disability and is likely to have to respond to the inquiry’s final report.

The committee will now be contacting witnesses who previously gave evidence to ask if they need to update their evidence.

A spokesperson for the committee, now chaired by Labour MP Debbie Abrahams, said it had not yet decided whether to hold further evidence sessions.

Alison Burton, whose father-in-law Errol Graham starved to death after DWP wrongly stopped his benefits when he missed a work capability assessment, said she was “definitely glad” the inquiry had been reopened.

She gave evidence about his case to the committee at a virtual round-table evidence session, and she said the safeguarding issues raised by the inquiry “still continue to affect people”. 

She made it clear to the committee that DWP needed to have a legal duty of care to those receiving benefits.

She told Disability News Service (DNS): “I think if they had one it would go a long way to resolve a lot of the issues.”

Burton said such a duty of care would force the department to review all its practices “because there are plenty of practices within the department that would not comply with a duty of care”.

Among them, she said, would be the department’s continuing resistance to obtaining further medical evidence for many claimants – including her father-in-law – particularly for those with mental distress.

She said: “If the department had a duty of care, they would have to obtain further medical evidence because it would be part of their duty of care.”

She is convinced that if DWP had had such a duty at the time and had obtained further medical evidence in her father-in-law’s case, he would still be alive. 

Yesterday (Wednesday), work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall suggested to the committee that she was open to the idea of DWP being given a legal safeguarding duty (see separate story).

Joy Dove, whose daughter Jodey Whiting took her own life in February 2017, 15 days after she had her out-of-work disability benefits wrongly stopped for missing a work capability assessment, also welcomed the committee’s decision to reopen the inquiry and said she was “eagerly awaiting the outcome”.

She highlighted how a report by the Independent Case Examiner found that DWP failed five times to follow its own safeguarding rules in the weeks leading up to her daughter’s suicide, despite her long history of mental distress.

Even though a “flag” was placed on DWP’s ESA system to alert staff that she was a “vulnerable” claimant because of her mental ill-health, DWP failed to refer her request for a home assessment to Maximus, the company that was carrying out WCAs on its behalf.

Maximus also failed to act on her request, even though it had been included in the ESA50 questionnaire she had filled out.

Grassroots groups of disabled people, such as Black Triangle, Disabled People Against Cuts, the Mental Health Resistance Network, and the Spartacus network, spent years highlighting deaths linked to DWP’s actions.

Concerns have also been raised by relatives such as Burton and Dove who have called for action after the deaths of their family members.

Some of the evidence linking DWP with the deaths of benefit claimants has come through prevention of future deaths reports written by coroners, several of which only emerged years after they were written.

Other evidence of persistent DWP safeguarding flaws has emerged through freedom of information requests to the department, which have revealed how hundreds of recommendations for improvements have been made by DWP’s own secret reviews into the deaths of claimants.

Some of these reviews showed DWP staff continuing to make the same fatal errors, year after year.

The evidence collected by DNS and others, stretching back more than a decade, has shown how DWP repeatedly ignored recommendations to improve the safety of its disability benefits assessment system, leading to countless avoidable deaths.

It also shows how DWP hid evidence from independent reviews, and how the department failed to keep track of the actions taken in response to recommendations made by its own secret reviews.

Evidence also demonstrates that the cultural problems within DWP extend far beyond the assessment system, touching all aspects of its dealings with disabled people in the social security system.

The evidence, compiled over the last decade by DNS and other journalists, academics and activists, shows systemic negligence by DWP, a culture of cover-up and denial, and a refusal to accept that the department has a duty of care to those disabled people claiming support through the social security system.

Much of that evidence has been brought together in a detailed timeline, as part of the Deaths by Welfare project headed by Dr China Mills and supported by Healing Justice Ldn, which works with marginalised and oppressed communities.

Meanwhile, the anti-poverty charity Turn2us has launched a free online tool that aims to simplify the application process for personal independence payment (PIP), the disability benefit which contributes towards the extra costs associated with an impairment or health condition.

The Turn2us PIP Helper offers step-by-step guidance, an eligibility checker, PIP award estimations, mental wellbeing resources, and essential information.

One of the reasons for developing the tool was to help disabled people obtain some of the £870 million in PIP payments that go unclaimed every year because of people who start claims but do not complete them or who are eligible for higher payments but are not receiving them.

One of the project partners is Disability Rights UK, which said it hoped the tool would “ensure as many disabled people as possible can access the appropriate PIP award”.

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, John Pring’s book on the deaths linked to DWP, is published by Pluto Press 

Credit for this article goes to the Disability News Service