These Widespread Failures

John Pring writes:

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) staff are making thousands of potentially fatal errors, particularly on disabled people’s universal credit claims, three years after new “quality assurance” checks were introduced.

Reports obtained by Disability News Service (DNS) analyse whether DWP staff are meeting 17 customer support standards (CSS), which were designed to “improve the experience of customers with complex needs and significantly reduce instances of serious cases by providing the right support at the right time”.

But the copies of the CSS “insight reports” from the last five quarters – secured through a freedom of information request – show no sign that DWP is addressing these widespread failures.

DWP previously made it impossible to calculate how frequently the errors are being made, because it no longer says in the reports how many cases are being sampled, although in one report in 2024 – before it stopped including the sample sizes – the department checked 1,653 universal credit cases. 

The March 2025 report shows that, of the sample of cases examined across the previous six months, DWP staff failed 254 times to record that a universal credit claimant who needed additional support had “complex needs”.

In the same period, staff failed 500 times to record that a claimant had to be referred for a conversation about homelessness.

In the September 2025 report, staff failed 235 times to record that a claimant who needed additional support had accessibility needs.

The following report, in December 2025, showed staff failing 453 times in six months to provide a summary on the universal credit system of a claimant’s needs or additional support requirements.

And the most recent report – for March 2026 – appears to show staff performance deteriorating even further, with staff failing 664 times in the previous six months to provide a summary of a claimant’s needs or additional support requirements.

Without DWP revealing how large the samples were, it is impossible to estimate how widespread these ongoing safeguarding failings are.

But it is likely that if scaled up across the country – with tens of thousands of new universal credit health claimants every month – these blunders are likely to be happening many thousands of times a month.

The reports also show multiple, significant errors across counter fraud, compliance and debt; employment and support allowance; pension credit; and state pension.

The potential for these errors to have a fatal impact was demonstrated three years ago by the death of Nazerine Anderson, from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire.

Among the errors made in her case, DWP was repeatedly told of her mental distress and suicidal ideation, but her work coach failed to record her “vulnerability” on her universal credit profile, while also failing to record updated information about her repeated visits to hospital on the relevant part of the system.

Two years ago, DNS reported how a survey by the Commons work and pensions committee found two-thirds of DWP staff did not have enough time to deal with safeguarding concerns “carefully” and “correctly”, despite multiple deaths of benefit claimants that have been linked with DWP’s actions and failings.

And in December 2023, a dossier of evidence submitted by the PCS union to DWP showed the department to be a failing organisation in a “state of crisis” and facing a “near collapse” of its benefits systems, with staff accusing DWP of “deliberate neglect” and revealing that claimants in vulnerable situations were “falling through the gaps” in the system.

DWP said this week that the CSS insight reports were an internal quality assurance measure and were not designed to assess how often issues were arising across the department.

It also said that it continually reviewed and improved the way it identified, recorded and responded to the needs of claimants, and that it had a culture of continuous improvement and scrutiny.

A DWP spokesperson said: “The Customer Support Standards (CSS) insight reports are based on small samples of case reviews which identify areas for improvement – it is a misinterpretation and factually inaccurate to use them to estimate how frequently issues occur across our wider caseload.

“Protecting vulnerable customers is a priority and we are now further strengthening the CSS framework through a relaunch programme across DWP, including enhanced awareness training so customers receive the support they need.”