Contents
Lib Dems want to use new Hillsborough Law to force DWP to release secret reports into deaths 3
Darling accuses DWP of ‘absolutely shameful’ cover-up over Access to Work changes 4
Disabled activists working with peers to address serious flaws in ‘dangerous’ assisted dying bill 5
UN calls for human rights assessment of government’s benefit cuts bill and mental health reforms 8
DWP is ‘dysfunctional’ and needs major review, says Lib Dem Steve Darling 11
Mother left ‘disgusted’ by DWP’s silence over secret report into Jodey Whiting’s death 17
Other disability-related stories covered by mainstream media this week 21
Davey stirs up hostility towards disabled claimants, as Lib Dem spokesperson links similar attacks to far right
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has whipped up hostility towards disabled people by suggesting there is widespread fraud among claimants of personal independence payment (PIP), despite his own work and pensions spokesperson linking similar unfounded attacks to the far right.
In an interview with Times Radio at the Liberal Democrat party conference in Bournemouth, Sir Ed suggested the reduction in face-to-face assessments had led to “quite a lot of fraud” among the recent increase in PIP claimants since the start of the pandemic.
But the latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) estimate that just 0.4 per cent of PIP spending in 2024-25 was due to fraud, while the previous year’s estimate had been zero per cent.
Despite these facts, Sir Ed said: “There’s a real suggestion in those numbers, by the way the Conservatives managed the system, that there’s quite a lot of fraud there and surely everyone can agree we should go after the fraud to make sure that people who need the benefits that people who are really disabled can still get them.”
But Sir Ed’s comments came on the same morning (Sunday) that his own work and pensions spokesperson, disabled MP Steve Darling, told Disability News Service that far-right activists were launching similar attacks on disabled claimants using dubious figures on economic inactivity.
Darling said: “My real fear is that in our now Trumpian world, [the far right] don’t need the facts to add up to make outlandish claims.”
He said it was disturbing how “the far right will just make up narratives for their own purposes, and demonising others is part of their playbook and sadly people with disabilities and quite often people with hidden disabilities are in their crosshairs.
“It’s part of that push back against the far right [and what] we need to be doing is unpicking that, because otherwise that half-truth will be built on by the far right to demonise people with disabilities.”
Sir Ed also mirrored claims by right-wing politicians when he claimed in the Times Radio interview that it was vital to reduce spending on social security, despite widely-available official figures showing that expenditure is stable as a proportion of GDP*.
His comments on PIP were particularly embarrassing because he focused in his main conference speech on Tuesday on attacking Reform UK and its leader, Nigel Farage, warning repeatedly of the “Trump-inspired country Farage wants us to become”.
Asked about his leader’s comments, Darling declined to say if he agreed with them, but yesterday (Wednesday) he issued a statement through his party’s press office.
He said: “Liberal Democrats are proud champions for the most vulnerable in society.
“We led the charge against the government’s ill-thought welfare cuts bill and played an instrumental role in defeating plans to slash PIP.
“We will always stand up for disabled people and their carers.
“Ed rightly pointed out that the Conservative party’s move to telephone assessments has damagingly undermined public trust in the welfare system.
“A fair system of in-person assessments, where possible, is vital to make sure this crucial support is there for people who need it.
“More broadly, Liberal Democrats have long argued the best way to reduce welfare spending is to tackle the root causes of the rising welfare bill – by seriously investing in health and care, and making it easier for disabled people to access the world of work.”
Sir Ed’s speech to the conference included just two mentions of disabled people, but neither in relation to his own party’s policies.
Instead, he mentioned family carers like himself 10 times in Tuesday’s speech, without once mentioning the adult social care charging crisis, which sees tens of thousands of disabled people falling into debt every year because of those charges (see separate story).
*Gross domestic product, the size of the country’s economy in a particular year
25 September 2025
Lib Dems want to use new Hillsborough Law to force DWP to release secret reports into deaths
The Liberal Democrats are set to try to use the government’s new Hillsborough Law to force the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to release secret reports into the deaths of disabled benefit claimants.
For years, the department has refused to hand bereaved relatives the internal process reviews (IPRs) it carries out into deaths that have been linked to its actions and failures.
It releases reviews only when ordered to do so by a coroner, or a court, or very rarely on other occasions – there is no record of it doing so in such circumstances – because it insists they are intended for learning purposes within the department.
This week, Disability News Service (DNS) has reported DWP’s latest refusal to release an IPR – or even to say if such a review was carried out – to a family, this time following the death of Jodey Whiting (see separate story).
Her mother, Joy Dove, is in her ninth year of campaigning for justice for her daughter, who took her own life in February 2017.
In a letter to Dove, DWP said IPRs were “internal retrospective investigations focused on organisational learning” and “often contain sensitive personal information about claimants” and so “could be considered a breach of privacy”, even though the claimant is dead.
The letter, from the Government Legal Department, said DWP was “working towards a more open approach to sharing findings and learning from IPRs”, but this is believed to refer only to anonymised recommendations made by the reviews rather than the facts they uncover.
DNS reported in June that a DWP director who gave evidence at the second inquest into Jodey Whiting’s suicide claimed she didn’t know whether an IPR had been carried out and would have to ask colleagues.
The minister for social security and disability, Sir Stephen Timms, came into his post last year pledging to increase transparency within the department.
But he has so far refused to change the department’s position, even though adult safeguarding reviews – sometimes examining the same deaths as IPRs – are released to relatives, and are published anonymously.
Now Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesperson, has pledged to use the government’s new public office (accountability) bill, otherwise known as the Hillsborough Law, to force DWP to publish IPRs and release them to families.
This is because the new bill includes a legal duty on public authorities and public officials “to act with candour, transparency and frankness”.
In an interview with DNS at his party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, Darling said he wanted the bill to produce a “culture change” within DWP and the whole of Whitehall, and that he intends to ask parliamentary questions about how the release of IPRs should be part of that.
He said it should be the same approach as in the aviation industry when there are near misses and “things have gone wrong”.
Otherwise, he said, “how can you expect the rest of the organisation to learn from it and the rest of society to learn where things have gone wrong?”
*The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, DNS editor John Pring’s book on the years of deaths linked to DWP, is published by Pluto Press
25 September 2025
Darling accuses DWP of ‘absolutely shameful’ cover-up over Access to Work changes
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been accused of an “absolutely shameful” cover-up, after refusing to release documents that should show why disabled people across the country have faced cuts to their Access to Work support.
Disabled campaigners have been warning for the last 18 months of DWP cuts and inconsistent decisions on their Access to Work (AtW) claims.
But when social security and disability minister Sir Stephen Timms was challenged on these apparent cuts this summer, he insisted that no guidance had been issued to reduce support, and he said: “No changes have been made to Access to Work policy.”
In his response to a written parliamentary question from Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesperson Steve Darling in July, he said instead that guidance was “now being more consistently applied” and that “work has been underway to improve [AtW] decision-making by applying the guidance with greater consistency, to provide a fairer process”.
He said: “This may mean that some awards change at the point of renewal, but there has been no change in Scheme policy, or instruction to reduce support levels.”
But Sir Stephen added: “Any updates to operational guidance are reflected through the published version available online at GOV.UK.”
Disability News Service (DNS) subsequently submitted a freedom of information request for DWP to provide all the changes to AtW “operational guidance” in the last 24 months.
But DWP has now replied to say that, although it holds this information, it would take more than three-and-a-half working days to determine “whether the Department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting it”, so it is not obliged to seek the documents under freedom of information laws.
The DWP freedom of information team said this was because “the time period you have chosen is very wide and the topic you ask about is very broad” and suggested instead that DNS should “narrow your request to the latest version of a specific section of a particular topic within Access to Work that you are interested in”.
Speaking to DNS at the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this week, Darling said this lack of transparency from DWP was “absolutely shameful”.
He said: “We need to have that transparency about what is going on, because the evidence we have has demonstrated that there have been significant changes [to people’s AtW support packages].”
He said he was convinced that cuts were being enacted by DWP even if they were coming through operational changes rather than alterations in policy.
He told DNS that he has heard from disabled people made redundant from disability charities who have been offered much lower levels of support when they applied for AtW support with their new job.
He said: “What was taken as a given with their previous employment, [AtW] are shrinking it down, whether it’s travel to work or the level of support workers, or the way support workers are employed.
“It is just absolutely perverse.
“I’m sure there are cuts; there are cost savings happening there and I’m sure the Treasury are delighted with it being sucked back into the system.”
A consultation on the future of the AtW scheme has now closed.
Work and pensions minister Baroness Sherlock said, in a written answer to the disabled Liberal Democrat peer Baroness [Celia] Thomas earlier this month, that DWP was now “reviewing all aspects of the Scheme now that the consultation has closed”.
25 September 2025
Disabled activists working with peers to address serious flaws in ‘dangerous’ assisted dying bill
Disabled activists who are working with sympathetic peers to address the serious risks posed by the assisted dying bill believe there is also still a chance that the legislation could eventually be thrown out by the House of Lords.
Not Dead Yet UK (NDY UK) said there were grounds for “hope” after the completion of the first two days of debate on the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill in the Lords.
Friday’s debate saw speakers opposed to the bill outnumbering supporters by about two to one.
NDY UK said the campaign was “in the best place it could have been, because we can’t kill the bill at this stage.
“While NDY UK continues to oppose the bill in principle, it recognises the need to engage with the legislative process to help ensure, if the bill does pass, it contains the strongest possible safeguards to protect disabled people.”
Almost two-thirds of peers who spoke during the debate on Friday (19 September) were opposed to the current version of the bill, while a little over a third were in favour, a similar proportion to the first day of the debate the previous Friday (12 September).
Of 15 Labour peers who spoke on 19 September, nine were in favour, five were against, and one – speaking for the government – was neutral.
But of 29 Conservative speakers, just seven were in favour and 22 were opposed to the bill in its current form.
Liberal Democrat peers were split, with two on each side, while of 11 crossbench speakers, five were in favour and six were against, while seven non-affiliated peers spoke against the bill and just one in favour.
George Fielding, a member of NDY UK’s coordinating group, who watched both days of the second reading debate from the floor of the Lords – as he is a wheelchair-user – said he was “genuinely moved by the quality of the debate, by the nature of the debate”.
He said NDY UK and other opponents of legalisation had formed “a hotchpotch alliance” among cross-party and crossbench peers.
He said: “We are building a network and a consensus across the Lords and I think that is emblematic of the fact that this bill will touch pretty much every corner of our society, and every corner of the House of Lords has people we have found are sympathetic to our views.”
Fielding said NDY UK was convinced that the bill would be “significantly amended” by peers “because the consensus is, at the very, very least, that this is a dangerous bill, it will foreshorten lives.
“At the very least, this is going to be one of the most significantly-amended bills in parliamentary history.”
He said NDY UK was “working closely with cross-party peers and allies to propose amendments aimed at closing loopholes and reducing risks, especially around coercion, eligibility, and judicial oversight.”
Fielding said there was an “incredible effort going in the Lords” – with input from NDY UK – to make the bill safer through amendments, because it was currently “unworkable”.
NDY UK welcomed the decision on Friday to set up a select committee of peers that will take expert oral evidence from ministers, professional bodies and legal experts, which Fielding said would be “another public opportunity” for peers to probe the bill’s weaknesses and to “demonstrate how dangerous this bill is”.
He added: “NDY UK plans to contribute evidence and research to inform the committee’s understanding of how disabled people may be affected by the bill.”
This committee will hold six evidence sessions over three weeks, beginning in the week of 20 October.
The committee stage will then follow, with its clause-by-clause examination of the bill.
Among those who spoke in Friday’s debate was disabled Conservative peer Lord [Kevin] Shinkwin, who said the bill would “prise open” a “Pandora’s box” that would be “the stuff of nightmares”.
He said the bill “gives the state a licence to kill the wrong type of people.
“I am the wrong type. This bill effectively puts a price on my head.”
He told fellow peers that, if the bill’s scope was expanded over time, he faced “the realistic possibility, as a severely disabled person, of being killed as a result of legislation passed by [the House of Lords]”.
And he pointed out that no organisation of or for disabled people supported the bill.
Another disabled Conservative peer, Lord [Craig] Mackinlay, who became disabled in 2023, said he had found the “joyous, tear-flecked celebrations” by some MPs when the “unwholesome” bill was passed in the Commons to be “quite bizarre and chilling”.
Among his concerns was the risk of coercion, and he told peers: “I am professionally trained and licensed to do probate work through the Institute of Chartered Accountants; believe me, post-death battles over inheritance can get very ugly.
“I am fearful of the coercion of the elderly and the vulnerable. It is so obvious.”
Baroness [Luciana] Berger, a former Labour MP and minister, recalled her shock when hearing a constituent speak of wanting their family member dead.
She said she had also not forgotten “the words and realities of too many former constituents: people isolated and abused in their own homes, sometimes for decades, in fear for their own lives; people who felt like a burden because of long-term illness or serious mental health conditions, especially the elderly; and people treated as though their lives were worth less because they had a disability.
“Many were from low-income backgrounds, facing not only poor health but the crushing stress of unaffordable care costs.”
She was another peer to point out that there was “no organisation of or for disabled people in this country that supports the bill”, and she added: “In considering who the bill might benefit by giving them more autonomy, we must equally consider who it may harm by taking their autonomy away.”
The former Conservative minister for disabled people, Lord [Mark] Harper, told fellow peers that many of the disabled people he had met as minister and shadow disability minister were “profoundly concerned by what the bill will do to society’s view of people who have challenges thrown in front of them”.
He said the bill was “not supported by a single organisation in this country that represents disabled people – not a single one – and we should listen to their views and take them very seriously”.
The Liberal Democrat peer Lord Beith said: “I have this fear – this instinct – that this is one of those big decisions that society may one day regret. There will be no way back.”
Lord Falconer, the Labour peer sponsoring the bill in the Lords, told fellow peers: “One of the features of this debate was the personal experience that so many people have had of how, had that option been available, it would have ended terrible suffering.
“That suffering is not often about the pain but about the lack of dignity and the profound desire to keep control, because that is what people want.
“I believe, from my own experience and from talking to so many people, that having that option is important.”
NDY UK argues instead – with many other disabled-led organisations – that the bill risks embedding discrimination into end-of-life law, “especially at a time when many disabled and terminally-ill people still struggle to access basic care and support”.
Lord Falconer also apologised for not declaring in the first day’s debate that he had benefited from an assistant funded by Bernard Lewis – founder of high street retail chain River Island and a supporter of legalisation of assisted suicide – to support him with his work on the bill, and that literature he had sent to fellow peers had been funded by the pro-legalisation organisation Dignity in Dying.
25 September 2025
UN calls for human rights assessment of government’s benefit cuts bill and mental health reforms
Disabled experts from the United Nations have told the UK government to carry out a “comprehensive” assessment of the human rights impact of its universal credit cuts bill, further plans to reform disability benefits, and its mental health reforms.
The UN’s committee on the rights of persons with disabilities (CRPD) had previously raised concerns about the impact on disabled people of the Universal Credit Act, the mental health bill, and further reforms laid out in March’s Pathways to Work green paper.
It wrote to the government after being alerted to the implications of its plans by DPO Forum England and the user-led, rights-based organisation Liberation.
Now, after assessing the government’s response, and evidence provided by disabled people’s organisations, the committee has called on the UK government to act.
It says it should assess the impact of its reforms, and ensure – in “close consultation” with disabled people – that its future plans do not cause any further “retrogression” in their rights, following years of attacks by successive governments.
The UN committee calls for a comprehensive human rights assessment of both the Universal Credit Act and Pathways to Work, before implementing the cuts and reforms to disability benefits expected in this autumn’s white paper.
And it calls on work and pensions ministers to take measures to “eliminate and reduce” the negative impact of the Universal Credit Act on disabled people, and to carry out a full assessment of its impact after its measures have been implemented.
It should then – again, in close consultation with disabled people – set out a plan to mitigate the impact of the act to ensure disabled people have access to the support they need to fulfil their rights to live independently, be included in the community, obtain work and have an adequate standard of living.
And it says that government plans to scrap the work capability assessment must be “designed and implemented” with the “close consultation and active involvement” of disabled people, and that they should not lead to any further assault on disabled people’s rights.
It calls for action to ensure, after months of concerns about Labour’s plans to force banks to carry out mass surveillance of claimants through its “Orwellian” public authorities (fraud, error and recovery) bill – currently approaching its final parliamentary stages – that those banks are not able to access claimants’ personal and private information.
The committee also calls for a comprehensive human rights assessment of the government’s mental health bill, which has been approved by the House of Lords and reaches the report stage in the Commons on 14 October, to ensure it is “fully aligned” with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).
And it says the government should improve its procedures for measuring the impact of new laws on the rights of disabled people.
Rick Burgess, co-chair of DPO Forum England, said: “We are grateful to the UN for recommending the UK government make a full human rights assessment of the impact of its social security policies, introduce mitigations to protect us from further harm, protect us from bank spying, and remind the government they should be consulting closely with disabled people and our organisations.
“It illustrates again that the UK government remains hostile to disabled people, and evades its treaty and legal obligations, but we will not relent in defending our rights and lives.”
Dorothy Gould, Liberation’s founder, said she was “absolutely delighted” that the committee’s response “cuts right through” the government’s attempts to justify its mental health bill, and she praised its “vital” intervention and “refutation of the government’s stance”.
She said the government’s earlier response to the committee had “utterly failed either to acknowledge the continuing, highly discriminatory nature of this bill, or to set out any plans for the fundamental changes that are needed” and had “misleadingly claimed” the bill was compatible with UNCRPD.
And she said it was a “complete disgrace” that the government had “yet again tried to justify the bill’s continuing treatment of people in acute mental distress and people with learning difficulties, or autistic people, as second-class citizens”, and had “again tried to argue that involuntary hospitalisation and forced treatment are not disability-based discrimination”.
Gould said the government was also still failing to make the committee’s Deinstitutionalisation Guidelines “its baseline for ensuring that we can instead live independently in the community, just like anyone else”, while also claiming it was making good use of consultation with user-led groups and individuals with lived experience “in the teeth of contrary evidence”.
Asked if the UK government accepted the committee’s recommendations, and if it would act on them, a DWP spokesperson failed to mention the recommendations in its statement, although it insisted the government was committed to implementing the convention.
In its statement, DWP said: “We’re changing the welfare system so sick or disabled people have the opportunities to move into good, secure work and out of poverty as part of our Plan for Change.
“The views of disabled people remain at the heart of our decision making, including through the consultation earlier this year and the Timms Review, which will be co-produced with disabled people and their organisations.
“Our reforms will rebalance the rates of universal credit to reduce the perverse incentives that trap people out of work, while giving people the genuine support they need through our £3.8 billion employment support package.”
Asked if the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) accepted the committee’s recommendations, and if it would act on them, a DHSC spokesperson also failed to mention the committee in its statement.
Instead, it said: “The Mental Health Act is there to protect people when they are at their most vulnerable, and in many cases, it has saved lives.
“But it is hugely outdated and has not kept pace with evolving understanding of mental health, learning disability and autism.
“Through our mental health bill, this government is now one step closer to bringing forward the essential reforms that will transform the care of some of our most vulnerable people, providing them with more dignity, choice and voice.
“The 10 Year Health Plan sets out ambitious plans to boost mental health support across the country so people can access the right support at the right time in the right place.
“This includes ensuring more people get the support they need in the community, closer to where they live.”
25 September 2025
DWP is ‘dysfunctional’ and needs major review, says Lib Dem Steve Darling
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is “dysfunctional” and needs to be the subject of a major review, according to the disabled MP who speaks for the Liberal Democrats on work and pensions.
Steve Darling said his first year as an MP and as the party’s spokesperson had convinced him of the major problems within DWP and the “broken” social security system.
He said a review would need to engage with disabled people and others with lived experience of the benefits system, and academics, because the benefits system should be co-designed with claimants.
In an interview with Disability News Service at his week’s Liberal Democrat party conference in Bournemouth, Darling also raised concerns about the new work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden.
He said McFadden appeared to be a “take no prisoners” and “driven” politician and an “enforcer”, and he raised concerns about his past comments about financial support for people with mental distress.
McFadden told Times Radio in March that he wanted benefit claimants with “mental health and depression and anxiety” to be “given support but not financial support”.
Darling also said that McFadden appeared to be a career politician who was lacking in “empathy and engagement and passion for people”, and that he seemed to be “a bit of a SPAD*-spawned apparatchik” who would “probably take no prisoners in driving forward with Starmer’s plans”.
He said he believed that the right-wing Reform UK was “worrying [the government] massively and I fear that they may lose their humanity for fear of Reform”.
Darling also said he had serious concerns about DWP forcing its disabled advisers to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
He said he and his wife had been forced to sign an NDA after winning a disability discrimination legal case and he said: “I really hate NDAs. They are meant to be there to protect intellectual property of commercial interests.
“One of the things that we need to see change on is the culture of DWP and having a more open and transparent approach.”
He said that “slapping NDAs on those who they are engaging with” sends a “negative” message.
Darling also called for the Commons work and pensions committee to investigate the unreliability of DWP statistics on “economic inactivity”.
DNS reported last week that the proportion of working-age disabled people in England who are “economically inactive” was not “spiralling” and may even have fallen over the last nine years, according to new official government statistics.
The new figures came from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, just as a leading expert, Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger, from King’s College London, published a blog which showed that DWP’s “raw statistics” on all out-of-work benefits – not just relating to disabled people – were “wildly misleading”.
Darling said he was “keen to suggest” an inquiry by the work and pensions committee into the use of these statistics.
He said an investigation would “either debunk” the figures used by DWP or prove their accuracy.
He said: “My real fear is that, in our now Trumpian world, [the far right] don’t need the facts to add up to make outlandish claims.
“The far right will just make up narratives for their own purposes and demonising others is part of their playbook and sadly people with disabilities and quite often people with hidden disabilities are in their crosshairs.”
He said that “unpicking” the claims and counter-claims behind the figures on economic inactivity should be “part of that push back against the far right that we need to be doing” because “otherwise that half-truth will be built on by the far right to demonise people with disabilities”.
*A SPAD is a ministerial special adviser
25 September 2025
Lib Dems insist they are still focused on social care, despite leader concentrating again on carers
Senior Liberal Democrat MPs have insisted they are still committed to social care reform and want to move towards eliminating all care charges, despite the party saying little or nothing about the issue during its annual conference this week.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey focused again on improving support for “family carers” – he is one himself – but said nothing in his main speech about disabled people who rely on care and support, other than saying he wanted to see a country that “properly values care” and one “where we take care seriously”.
He mentioned family carers like himself 10 times in Tuesday’s speech, without once mentioning the adult social care crisis, which sees tens of thousands of disabled people falling into debt every year because of care charges.
Last year, Disability Law Service published research which showed that disabled people across England were continuing to face unlawful discrimination and inequality on an “unparalleled” scale due to “unjust” social care charging policies.
Earlier in the conference, Dr Danny Chambers, the party’s mental health spokesperson, told Disability News Service (DNS) that he was in favour of moving towards free social care.
He said disabled people were “inadvertently sort of being punished for having a disability because of the changes in personal independence payment and all that kind of stuff, so if it ends up giving people more independence and allowing them to live a much more fulfilling life, it actually ends up costing the taxpayer less anyway.”
At last year’s general election, the party promised to offer free personal care to all adults, although it would not scrap charges for other support such as housework, shopping, laundry and engaging with the local community.
During a Health Foundation and Ipsos fringe event, Dr Chambers said the party was “absolutely focusing” on social care.
The Winchester MP said that, at any one time, the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester had between 160 and 200 people “who would be better off cared for with a social care package than stuck in a hospital bed”.
But, he said, it costs more than £850 a night to keep someone in a hospital bed and only a fraction of that to fund a social care package.
This may save a council money from its social care budget, he told the meeting, but “as a tax-payer, you don’t care which silo it comes out of, it’s costing us £850 a night to keep these hundreds of people in a hospital bed that don’t need it.
“Our mantra has been, ‘You can’t fix the NHS without fixing social care.’”
He said his party had been “genuinely disappointed and quite annoyed” that the new Labour government had so far placed “so little emphasis on social care”, including in the NHS 10 Year Health Plan for England, and the NHS workforce plan, due this autumn, and extra funding provided to the NHS.
He said: “None of it is focusing on social care.
“They are pouring money into a leaky bucket, and if you do not plug those holes it doesn’t matter how much money or how much you try and reform other parts of the NHS, it means there’s always going to be this huge drain that means you cannot unblock these huge problems.”
At a question-and-answer session, also attended by Dr Chambers, the party’s health and care spokesperson, Helen Morgan, told DNS that she came away from a cross-party roundtable meeting on social care reform feeling “reasonably optimistic”.
The long-awaited meeting was held to discuss the work of the government’s Independent Commission on Adult Social Care, which is chaired by the crossbench peer Baroness [Louise] Casey.
It was attended by senior representatives from the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green and Reform UK parties, including health and social care secretary Wes Streeting.
Asked by DNS whether she was encouraged by the attitudes of the other parties on social care, Morgan said on Monday that she came away feeling “reasonably optimistic”.
But she said she made clear in the meeting that the Liberal Democrats believed that the timetable set by the government, which will not see the commission produce a final report until 2028, was “too late”.
But she said: “At least we had that first discussion, and we had that opportunity to point out the urgency of delivering.
“It was an introductory discussion; it was trying to find the points of similarity between the different manifestos.
“I wouldn’t say there were any particular breakthroughs in the first discussion.
“At least we had that first discussion, and we had that opportunity to point out the urgency of delivering.”
Dr Chambers said earlier in the week that the government’s decision to wait until 2028 for the commission’s final report suggested it was “playing for time”.
He said: “We don’t need to wait until 2028 to say something needs to be done and then start the process of implementing something.”
At another fringe meeting, hosted by the Liberal Democrat Disability Association (LDDA), Dr Katharine Macy, LDDA’s chair, called for the party to do more to focus on social care.
They wrote the young carers motion to the party conference in 2019 which kickstarted Davey’s focus on carers.
And they told the fringe meeting that the party’s public statements on care can sometimes suggest that disabled people are “a burden”.
Dr Macy, a disabled person and carer themself, said: “There are times when it has crossed the line. There are times when it very much skirts the line.”
They said their party needed to be aware that there were more disabled people than carers, although the emphasis in its public statements also reflected a culture where caring is seen as noble and being disabled is seen as being a burden “and that is where we can start to change things”.
Dr Macy said the party needed to address its focus on caring rather than social care, but that the Liberal Democrats needed to do that by saying more about social care rather than less about caring.
25 September 2025
New publications ask how disabled people and allies can hold the state to account for welfare state killings
A new series of resources examines ways in which disabled people and allies can find ways to hold the state to account for the deaths of hundreds – and probably thousands – of claimants it has killed through welfare state violence.
The three resources are being released as part of the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing Justice Ldn, which has previously created a timeline charting 30 years of evidence linking the systemic violence of the Department for Work and Pensions with the killing of countless disabled claimants of benefits through state violence.
The Deaths by Welfare project has also produced an exhibition, podcasts, and more than 50 interviews with disabled activists and bereaved family members.
Healing Justice Ldn hopes the new resources* – written by Dr China Mills – will inspire activists to find new ways to secure welfare justice and work towards new, “life affirming” systems of support.
The first resource to be published, Deaths by Design, asks whether the social security system was actually “deadly by design” rather than being a system riddled with flaws and mistakes by DWP staff.
It points to the coroner who concluded at the end of an inquest into the death of Philippa Day that there were systemic flaws in the personal independence payment system.
As disabled activist and author Ellen Clifford said in one of the Deaths by Welfare podcasts: “They created a system that’s deliberately designed to push people into poverty because our lives are worth less to them than other people’s.”
And it quotes fellow disabled activist Rick Burgess, in another Deaths by Welfare interview, who said: “We’re now 14 years into this process; that’s not an accident, that’s not a passing fad – that’s a cultural democide against a demographic, that demographic being disabled people benefit claimants.”
Deaths by Design asks the question: “If systems are harmful by design then we need to campaign beyond ‘cuts’.
“If we only mobilise around ‘cuts’ to welfare, we might overlook how harmful the foundation of welfare can be.”
And it concludes: “People want to build a different welfare system but it’s hard to get specific about what we want… when all we’ve known is a violent bureaucratic system.”
Another of the resources, Evidence, examines how disabled people and bereaved families have produced evidence of state harm; how to use that evidence in ways that do not dehumanise disabled people; and how disabled people have used direct action to alert the public to this evidence.
It points out that constantly being asked to provide evidence of the harm the system is causing “mirrors the violence” of claimants being forced to prove they are disabled so they can receive the support they need to survive.
One of the questions it asks is: how many people must die through DWP violence before those in power listen and act?
The third resource, Accessing Justice, co-written by Dr Mills and Imogen Day – whose sister took her own life due to DWP’s actions and failings – examines how families bereaved by DWP killings have sought justice.
It looks at the experiences of relatives Joy Dove, Alison Burton and Imogen Day – each of them disabled people themselves – after the deaths of their daughter, father-in-law and sister through DWP violence.
It also hears from the mothers of Seni Lewis and Komang Jack Susianta, who were both killed by non-DWP state violence.
While Accessing Justice accepts that some activists want to see those guilty of complicity in the state killings face criminal justice, HJL also questions whether justice for those killed can ever be secured through the criminal justice system, and whether there are other ways of holding those responsible accountable.
*DNS editor John Pring was involved in editing the resources and was co-editor of the Deaths by Welfare timeline
25 September 2025
Mother left ‘disgusted’ by DWP’s silence over secret report into Jodey Whiting’s death
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has refused to release any information about a secret report into the death of a disabled woman, despite a coroner ruling that its actions had been the “trigger” for her suicide.
DWP has even refused to tell lawyers for the family of Jodey Whiting whether it carried out an internal process review (IPR) into her death.
It claimed in the letter that releasing an IPR to her family could breach her privacy, even though she died more than eight years ago.
It said IPRs were “internal retrospective investigations focused on organisational learning, not public accountability” and that they “often contain sensitive personal information about claimants, including health, benefit history, and interactions with DWP staff”.
It added: “The disclosure of such information, even to close family members, could be considered a breach of privacy.”
Disability News Service (DNS) reported in June that a second inquest into Jodey Whiting’s death – which only happened because of her mother’s eight-year campaign for justice and accountability – found that her “deteriorating” mental health had been “precipitated” by the withdrawal of her out-of-work disability benefits after she missed a work capability assessment.
But DNS also showed in June how DWP hid the truth from the coroner about its role in Jodey Whiting’s suicide, including by failing to confirm if an IPR was carried out.
Joy Dove, Jodey Whiting’s mother, told DNS this week that she was “really disgusted” by DWP’s refusal to release the IPR – or even to say whether one was carried out – after campaigning for more than eight years to discover the truth about DWP’s role in her daughter’s death, and for justice for her and countless other disabled people whose deaths were caused by DWP.
She said: “We were forced to give documents to the coroner, we had to do what we were told, so why the heck can’t they?
“What’s the problem? We know she’s dead because of them. What are they hiding?
“They don’t care. To them, Jodey is just a number. It’s not personal to them. They are not bothered.”
In the letter, a solicitor in the Government Legal Department – writing on behalf of DWP – made it clear that DWP “fully accepts the coroner’s conclusions” in the second inquest, and “accepts that the withdrawal of Jodey’s Employment and Support Allowance precipitated her deteriorating mental state”.
But further anguish was caused to the family by the Government Legal Department mis-spelling Jodey’s name in a brief one-line apology included in the letter, saying: “Please do pass on this heartfelt and sincere apology from DWP to Jodie’s family.”
Dove said she was annoyed at this lack of care and respect and said she did not consider it a “proper apology”.
She is now considering a complaint to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman over DWP’s actions and its role in her daughter’s death.
The letter came as Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesperson, told DNS that he was hoping to use the government’s new Hillsborough Law to force DWP to release IPRs to relatives.
This is because Labour’s public office (accountability) bill includes a new legal duty on public authorities and public officials “to act with candour, transparency and frankness”.
In an interview with DNS at his party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, Darling said he wanted the bill to produce a “culture change” within DWP and the whole of Whitehall, and that he intends to ask parliamentary questions on how the release of IPRs will be part of that.
The solicitor for Jodey Whiting’s family, Merry Varney, from Leigh Day, said yesterday (Wednesday): “Joy has fought for many years to secure recognition that Jodey’s death was caused by DWP failings.
“The second inquest into Jodey’s death confirmed that earlier this year and during the hearing the DWP witness was unable to confirm whether an internal process review had been competed following Jodey’s death.
“Joy had hoped that a full and frank apology, together with disclosure of information about any internal process review, would come from the DWP.
“The response indicates a continued unwillingness of the DWP to be fully transparent and to admit, in clear unequivocal terms, that their acts and omissions cause deaths.”
A DWP spokesperson said: “We continue to offer our sincerest condolences to Jodey Whiting’s family and are deeply apologetic for the misspelling of her name.”
The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, DNS editor John Pring’s book on the years of deaths linked to DWP, including Jodey Whiting’s, is published by Pluto Press
25 September 2025
Anger and frustration after DWP’s latest jobcentre announcement and McFadden’s ‘incentives’ comment
Sick and disabled people have raised serious concerns about the latest Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announcement on its strategy to persuade more claimants receiving out-of-work sickness and disability benefits to consider moving towards employment.
Many reacted angrily to DWP’s announcement that every jobcentre in England, Scotland and Wales now has “specialist” Pathways to Work advisers who will offer skills and employment support to claimants receiving out-of-work disability benefits.
DWP said it has redeployed 1,000 existing jobcentre staff to provide voluntary help to people on universal credit who have “no requirement to look for work or engage with job help because of their condition”.
Disabled people highlighted concerns this week about safeguarding and the lack of evidence for such a strategy, and they questioned why a Labour government did not do more to focus on cutting NHS waiting-lists and addressing barriers in the workplace.
Their anger and frustration only increased when new work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden claimed in an interview that there were currently “incentives” in the system for people to declare themselves unfit for work so they can “double their money”, and also claimed that people were “declaring themselves long-term sick”.
McFadden will have been aware that claimants cannot declare themselves “long term sick” but instead must go through the harsh work capability assessment process in order to be found not fit for work, and he should also have been aware that this system has led to countless deaths.
Researcher and writer Sue Jones responded on X/Twitter: “Progressive, incurable illnesses are not ‘perverse incentives’ you vicious man, and no amount of lying about people and inventing ‘incentives’ and motives will change the fact that many of us can no longer work, simply because we are too ill and disabled.”
DWP said it hoped its Pathways to Work advisers would help 65,000 people found to have limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCWRA) by the end of 2025-26.
DWP claimed this kind of “additional work coach support” was “proven to help people into work” and that research had found LCWRA claimants who accepted this support were a third more likely to be in work a year later.
However, the research it referenced, published by DWP in March*, showed the proportion of those in the LCWRA group in work rose from just eight per cent to 11 per cent, a year after the provision of “additional work coach support”.
The department said more than 10,000 people had taken up the voluntary offer and had had at least one appointment since April 2025.
It said it would not contact claimants with “the most severe and lifelong health conditions” – which DWP later confirmed will match the “severe conditions criteria” described in schedule one of the new Universal Credit Act – or those who receive support through the “special rules” for those with less than 12 months to live.
But there was significant concern among sick and disabled people on social media after the announcement.
Disabled People Against Cuts said on its Facebook page: “The question that’s in the back of our minds is, how long before it’s mandatory?”
Many warned that even a voluntary approach would cause serious safeguarding issues.
The anti-cuts grassroots group Disability Rebellion said on X/Twitter: “Here we go again – DWP are now going to ask thousands of UC claimants with no requirement to look for work to attend ‘work conversations’.
“No thought given to safeguarding or how unwell this could make people.”
Another grassroots group, Recovery in the Bin, said: “We don’t need f*****g skills. We need healthcare, housing, enforceable legal rights.
“Want to improve disabled people’s access to work? Make legal aid more widely available for disability discrimination cases.”
Others pointed out that such initiatives “barely make a dent in employment rates”, because the reasons sick and disabled people are not in work are not “lack of coaching, confidence, etc”.
Many suggested that the government would do better to focus on improving access to NHS services and investing in treatment for conditions such as long Covid and ME, and addressing discrimination by employers.
Similar points were raised by those who said the barriers they faced were not those that could be addressed by DWP Pathways to Work advisers.
One of those who responded to the announcement said: “I worked for Goldman Sachs, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, etc over the course of my career.
“I do not need more skills or experience. I am TOO ILL to work.”
Another said: “I’m chronically ill and mostly bedbound. I’m a fully skilled plater/welder.
“I also have qualifications in carpentry, hedge laying, dry stone walling, and also have chainsaw licence to fell medium sized trees.
“My problem isn’t skills. It’s illness.”
*DWP did not provide a link to this research in its press release
25 September 2025
Other disability-related stories covered by mainstream media this week
MPs have warned the Government of a “showdown” over reforms to the special educational needs system they fear will cut support for disabled children. Labour members say they are gearing up to vote against any changes that “take away services” or “reduce support, financial or otherwise” for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities. Backbenchers say their red lines would also include children losing their legal rights to funding and provision – currently set out through education health and care plans: https://inews.co.uk/news/education/starmer-collision-course-mps-send-reforms-austerity-3930632
Trafford Council’s new council tax reduction scheme must be quashed after a high court judge ruled it unfairly discriminated against two “vulnerable” residents who discovered they had to pay the full bill when previously they had to pay nothing because they were on benefits. A judge ruled the council’s working-age local council tax reduction scheme for 2025-26 was both unlawfully adopted and discriminatory against disabled people and carers on certain benefits: https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/high-court-slams-obviously-unfair-32514179
More than 1,000 disabled children across the UK are waiting for wheelchairs and mobility equipment that could transform their lives, according to charity Whizz Kidz. The charity, which helps wheelchair-users up to 25 years old, has been forced to close its specialist wheelchairs waitlist for the first time in its 35-year history. It says escalating costs and squeezed NHS budgets are creating a “huge demand” for its service, leading to long delays: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2zwm8m41mo
25 September 2025
News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com
