Disability News Service (DNS) has published a new 10,000-word article that shows how the Department for Work and Pensions repeatedly ignored recommendations to improve the safety of its disability benefits assessment system, leading to countless avoidable deaths of disabled claimants. Also how DWP ensured that key evidence linking its actions with those deaths was not considered by independent reviews, and how the department failed to keep track of what actions were taken in response to recommendations made by its own civil servants to improve the system.
The 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, and how the roots of its toxic culture stretch back at least 30 years.
Evidence was put together over the last decade by DNS, as well as by other journalists, academics and activists. It shows how DWP continues to pose a serious and continuing risk to the lives of disabled people who pass through the assessment system, and how the department itself is not fit for purpose and needs to be scrapped and rebuilt.
The evidence has been brought together for the first time in a detailed timeline that stretches back to the early-1990s, as part of the Deaths by Welfare project headed by Dr China Mills and supported by Healing Justice London, which works with marginalised and oppressed communities. Hopefully, a draft version of the timeline will be published for the first time in the next few weeks. There has been key input from activists and researchers Rick Burgess, Ellen Clifford, Nick Dilworth, and Dolly Sen.
