Disabled people are being hurt, harmed and killed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) at a scale that overshadows every other scandal in British society in recent decades, MPs have been told. Disabled activist Rick Burgess warned MPs on the Commons work and pensions committee that those at particular risk of harm were disabled people who have been unable to secure support from over-stretched welfare rights organisations.
Burgess was one of the disabled people whose activism led to groundbreaking research in 2015 by academics from Liverpool and Oxford universities that linked DWP’s work capability assessment with nearly 600 suicides in just three years. He told MPs yesterday (Wednesday) that DWP safeguarding “really only applies to people where there’s someone to notice” because there is a section of disabled people who are “under the radar” and there is “no-one to say they are at risk”. He said: “That’s where the risk cohort lives. That’s where the people who have died come from: that ‘under the radar’ section.” The evidence session was a follow-up to the committee’s report last year into safeguarding of “vulnerable” claimants, which called for deep-rooted cultural change across the department so it could address its current “deficient” approach to the issue.
Labour MP Debbie Abrahams, who chairs the committee, said the government had only accepted four of the report’s 21 recommendations. She said the driver for their inquiry had been the deaths of vulnerable claimants. And she said there had been more than 240 secret internal process reviews by DWP into deaths and serious harm of claimants since 2020, which the committee believed was “just the tip of the iceberg”. Only last week, Disability News Service (DNS) reported how an autistic circus skills teacher took his own life in January after weeks of mounting distress triggered by being left with a new £500 monthly charge for his social care package, after he was forced to migrate to universal credit from so-called legacy benefits.
Burgess, who is co-chair of DPO Forum England and facilitator of Greater Manchester Disabled People’s Panel, said DWP’s longstanding cultural problem persisted, with its “mindset of being disciplinarian or authoritarian”, and that disabled people were still feeling “very anxious, fearful and angry” despite some safeguarding improvements in recent years. He said that cultural change needed leadership, and he highlighted how a comment piece written by work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden had been headlined: “I’m sick of people taking advantage of fit notes who should be at work.”
Burgess told the MPs: “That is not the leadership that will lead to culture change. “It’s just not going to work if that attitude continues, grabbing headlines, negative approaches – as we call it, ‘scrounger rhetoric’ – being pushed around.” He said disabled people have now faced nearly two decades of “perpetual slandering” by the press and figures in successive governments.
Burgess said McFadden’s comment breached article eight of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which imposes a duty to promote the rights of disabled people and combat stereotypes. But he welcomed the regular meetings that Dr Gail Allsopp, DWP’s chief medical adviser, has been holding with disabled people who have had long-term involvement in issues around the years of harm and deaths linked to DWP.
Burgess also drew the committee’s attention to a DNS news story which revealed that DWP had admitted in a secret paper that the cumulative effect of multiple errors or “inaction” on benefit claims caused situations to “spiral out of control for vulnerable customers” and even led to their deaths. DWP admitted in the paper that there was a risk that it had become “unintentionally desensitized” to such failures.
Burgess – who gave evidence virtually, with a copy of
The Department, an exposé of the years of deaths linked to DWP, displayed prominently behind him – said: “They are self-aware to an extent, but they keep these reports secret. They are marking their own homework at the moment… would we accept that of most public bodies? The only organisations that get that level of secrecy or control are the intelligence services.”
The evidence session focused heavily on safeguarding issues connected with DWP’s universal credit (UC) working-age benefits system. Burgess told the committee that about 23,000 ESA claimants had had their claims closed without moving onto UC as part of DWP’s process of “migrating” claimants from so-called legacy benefits onto the new system. He repeated the call made in a letter from disabled people’s organisations to disability minister Sir Stephen Timms in March for all those who failed to migrate onto UC to be automatically moved across because, Burgess said, this group includes “extremely at risk people”. He said the migration process had “cut loose” thousands of disabled people.
Burgess also pointed to the many disabled people facing increased council tax or care charges – and sometimes both – after being migrated onto universal credit. He said: “This has been raised with Stephen Timms. It is still happening to this day. Months and months are going by and people are still getting these huge bills, and the councils aren’t waiting for DWP to solve it – they are starting to move into debt recovery, bailiffs, court action. That is happening because of the actions of the DWP for not even thinking this through; at least, that’s what they claim.”
Liberal Democrat MP John Milne said this was “shocking”. Daphne Hall, vice-chair of the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers, told the committee that problems with the universal credit migration process were “widespread across the UK”, with far too many cases where the multi-agency support that is supposed to be in place had “fallen through”. When people have had their legacy benefits ended by DWP because they missed their deadline to make a UC claim, a safeguarding referral is supposed to be sent to their local authority.
But she said councils were saying that these referrals by DWP were “inadequate” for them to act on them, so “the concern is that those people are just slipping through the net completely and we don’t know what’s happening to them”. She said this could mean that between 15,000 and 20,000 people may have failed to migrate to UC safely.
Hall also said that a UC computer system flaw meant that many disabled people who were previously in the employment and support allowance support group were still not being automatically placed in the UC limited capability for work-related activity group after migration, despite DWP being told repeatedly of the issue. This means that disabled people with high support needs are not receiving the extra benefits they are entitled to, are being wrongly forced to ask for fit notes, are being put through new and unnecessary work capability assessments, and are unfairly being subjected to strict conditions.
Caroline Selman, senior research fellow at Public Law Project, told the MPs that the key issue with the use of benefit sanctions by DWP to punish claimants was their “disproportionate” severity, with first-time relatively minor failings leading to 100 per cent of someone’s UC standard allowance being sanctioned, which she said was “a very severe income shock” for a claimant. Professor Michael Preston-Shoot, co-chair of the National Network of Adult Safeguarding Boards, told the committee: “We need DWP culturally to understand that DWP needs to engage with people, not simply to expect people to engage with them.” He said this was because “many people are unable rather than unwilling, but the assumption that they are unwilling means that they lose what they need to live, and I can’t understand how in a civilised society from a social justice point of view we do that”.
