Government tender notices reveal that the DWP signed a contract worth at least £1 million with private consultants the PSC to manage “co-production” of the controversial Timms Review.
The Public Service Consultants website reveals it also holds lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts and interests relating to AI, the NHS, social care, the civil service, aerospace, satellite surveillance, and defence. [1]
Disabled People’s Organisations, meanwhile, had to fight for even minimal funding for accessible engagement with the Timms Review.
The Work and Pensions Select Committee has since written to Sir Stephen Timms MP “concerned” at the approach to co-production.
Protests in Wales organised by disabled people, carers, and trade unions, have forced the DWP to cancel an upcoming in-person workshop in Cardiff and move it online, in an almost blow-by-blow repeat of protests last year.
Disabled People Against Cuts Cymru (DPAC Cymru) had also previously also exposed how local Disabled People’s Organisations were told they would have no say over the running of Timms Review workshops.
A spokesperson for the group said:
The DWP need to ask themselves why Disabled people feel the need to protest a review that is supposedly “co-produced” with them.
The Timms Review won’t become another one of the Public Service Consultants’ glossy case studies. Instead of delivering co-production, the PSC is managing a top-down review that is proving politically radioactive. Even the DWP’s one million pieces of silver might not buy enough soap to wash off the stink.
We have not been given the co-production we were promised by Timms and MPs must hold him to account. What’s needed now is an independent disability review, democratically led by disabled people and our organisations, including our trade unions. The DWP should turn up, shut up, and listen.
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Please direct press enquiries to dpac.cymru+press@gmail.com
Footnotes
[1] The PSC are also really quite hawkish about space being “a warfighting domain” where the UK must “act fast or risk becoming a second – tier space power”; they also have their hand in privitisation, urging the government to “partner with the third and private sectors to co-fund projects.”
