I received this openDemocracy newsletter on Thursday 23 November, this week - and I felt it needed sharing. The more people who know, the better. Knowledge is power - and may lead to accountability.
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| Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) - Photograph by William Hall, 1879 |
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The welfare system has taken another hit today
via a ‘benefits
crackdown’ in Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement.
Since the ‘welfare reform’ of 2007, disabled people have been
on the receiving end of these dehumanising and punishing
policies that make people out as ‘undeserving’, prioritise
work over people, and make life unlivable.
- But we now have evidence the Department for
Work and Pensions (DPW) knows its policies kill people. It
has been repeatedly warned of this fact and has even
confirmed it in its own research.
- It took years of campaigning by disabled
people to uncover this evidence, which largely comes in the
form of DWP reviews into deaths of claimants. Now it has been brought together as part of
the Deaths
by Welfare project at Healing Justice London. Since 2021,
journalist John Pring and I have been creating a timeline
– co-produced with disabled people – showing the links
between welfare policy and disabled people’s deaths.
- It also shows that not only is there often a delay between the introduction of a policy and the brutal impact it has on people's lives, but that delay tactics are central to DWP's weaponization of time as a strategy to avoid accountability.
Back to me here - as I reread what I have now read several times and create this post, I can scarcely believe this report. Do you have a similar problem? How extraordinary and insidious is our national decline.
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- To make matters worse, most families of those
who have died do not even know if a review has been carried
out into their loved one’s death because the DWP has always
argued this is private information – an argument found by an
Information Rights Tribunal to be an error in law – and can’t
be shared, not even with families.
 | | Neoliberalism - a wretched and mistaken economics that believes in reducing public expenditure and freeing market forces so that wealth can trickle down to the masses - led to the Age of Austerity - 2010-2023, and still the forecast for the future. Unless. |
- The first family to see an IPR (Internal Process Review) was Philippa
Day’s. Philippa, known as Pip, took her own life in 2019
after her disability benefits were stopped. Before she died, she told her sister that she
knew the assessment system was going to kill her:
“She felt that they were pressuring her to kill herself, she
felt that she didn’t matter because she was disabled”.
- In January 2021, the
coroner at the inquest into Philippa’s death found 28
separate “problems” with the administration of the Personal
Independent Payment (PIP) system contributed to her death –
concluding these were not individual errors by DWP and its
private sector contractor Capita but systemic
flaws.
- Pip’s sister Imogen told us, in an interview
for the Deaths
by Welfare podcast, that seeing the IPR “silenced my
night-time questions, right before I was going to sleep… It
made it incredibly clear that we as a family had done
everything that we could have done, and that it was a
governmental system that had let her down”. “I really feel for families that still don't
have answers,” she said.
- And Pip is not alone. It would later come to
light, after a sustained (and continuing) Freedom of
Information battle, that between 2014 and 2022, the DWP
carried out approximately 220 of these reviews – formerly
called peer reviews, now internal process reviews (IPRs). After finally obtaining redacted versions of
some of these, we found evidence of persistent and systemic
issues across welfare policy, and evidence that welfare
policy is life-threatening. The reviews also contained
hundreds of recommendations, which the DWP has admitted
having no system for tracking.
- What makes DWP reviews into what it calls the
‘death of a customer’ important is that they are (supposedly)
tools through which the DWP investigates the harms of its own
policies. And yet, they are designed and carried out in a way
that systemically hides any state accountability. And delays
in releasing the reviews is another way the department can
avoid being held accountable.
- What we have discovered has been learnt
slowly, largely through a mixture of FOIs, parliamentary
questions, queries to the DWP press office and documents
released through court cases or inquests. Many of the FOIs
have been submitted by Disability
News Service over the last nine years.
- This battle has revealed that policy is seen
to be outside the scope of such reviews and that findings are
‘not
be shared outside of the department’.
- An investigation
by the National Audit Office (NAO) on the information the DWP
holds on benefit claimants who ended their lives by suicide,
found the DWP does not identify patterns between people’s
deaths, meaning that “systemic issues which might be brought
to light through these reviews could be missed”. The NAO also found access to the reports is
restricted to the team handling them and the recommendations
are not tracked or monitored, meaning the DWP “does not know
whether the suggested improvements are implemented”.
- These recommendations include repeated
warnings that policies to assess people for out-of-work
disability benefits were putting the lives of “vulnerable”
claimants (likely to be mostly people with mental health
conditions or learning difficulties) at risk.
- Yes, the DWP’s own investigations were
identifying policies as potentially life-threatening. The
IPRs also showed a recurring pattern of staff failure to
follow DWP’s suicide guidance, which was introduced in 2009. Tactics used to delay the release of
information include claims by the DWP that the time required
to collect data, due to lack of centralised record-keeping,
was too costly and not in the public interest. This was used under Thérèse Coffey to block
requests about how many inquests relating to benefits
claimants who died by suicide her department had submitted
evidence to, as well as requests to find out how many
inquests had ruled DWP policies were partly responsible for
the deceased person’s state of mind. In both of these cases,
the information wasn’t shared due to “disproportionate cost”.
- These reviews should be publicly available by
default, and the DWP should be held publicly accountable to
making the changes required. Yet it may be that the IPR process is by
design unable to apprehend government accountability in
people’s deaths. IPR findings and recommendations come from
within the system that kills people, and therefore may never
be enough for full accountability or justice. While some
ascribe people’s deaths to flaws in a system that needs
reform, others see them as endemic to a system that needs
dismantling and creating anew, with disabled people, and the
analysis developed through lived experience, at the core.
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