DWP boss misleads MPs over £100 million plan to prevent deaths
The civil servant who leads the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has misled MPs about its failure to implement a plan drawn up to prevent suicides and learn lessons from the deaths of benefit claimants.
Peter Schofield, DWP’s permanent secretary, was asked by a cross-party committee yesterday (Wednesday) what had happened to the so-called DWP Excellence Plan, which secured more than £100 million Treasury funding in September 2019.
Disability News Service (DNS) showed last year that the plan had been watered down in at least six ways in the two years that Therese Coffey was secretary of state for work and pensions.
But three times yesterday (watch from 11.18 onwards), Schofield suggested to Sir Stephen Timms, chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, that the plan had been implemented in full.
When Sir Stephen asked if it had been implemented, Schofield replied: “Yeah,” before highlighting how just one of the many elements of the plan had been carried out, as well as two others he had mentioned moments earlier.
Schofield was later asked if all the measures listed in a diagram in the Excellence Plan had been completed.
He again replied that they had, although he went on to discuss how the pandemic had changed the way that some DWP roles had been carried out.
At no point did he admit that key parts of the plan had been dropped or watered down.
Sir Stephen then said: “Perhaps if you’d drop us a line, because the term DWP Excellence Plan had I think sort of disappeared, but by the sound of it the funding that was promised has all been delivered and you’re using it for the things that were envisaged?”
Again, Schofield said: “Yes,” although this time he added: “I’m not sure I can necessarily trace every pound just because so soon afterwards we were in the pandemic.”
Among the ways DWP failed to implement the plan was by abandoning the intention to pilot a scheme – SignpostingPlus – that would have tested ways of supporting claimants who were “beginning to struggle to cope, before they become harder to help through entrenched disadvantage”.
DWP also abandoned plans to measure whether it was reducing the number of “serious cases”, including claimant suicides.
And it scrapped plans to set up a new “Safeguarding Improvement Team”, which would “proactively introduce processes, procedures and policies to protect vulnerable customers and improve the effectiveness of DWP interventions”.
The department also watered-down plans to introduce a Serious Case Panel “with independent membership”.
Under Coffey’s leadership, the new panel was filled instead with senior DWP executives.
One-third of the Treasury funding for the DWP Excellence Plan – £36 million – had been allocated to improving safety, support for “customers with complex needs” and decision-making, and to learning from its mistakes.
An internal DWP document drawn up several months later showed how the department intended to deliver the plan, but responses to freedom of information requests have shown how it was later watered down.
The plan was supposed to cut the number of claimant deaths, improve support for “the most vulnerable” and provide a “more compassionate” culture within the department.
Throughout Coffey’s period in charge of DWP, from September 2019 to September 2022, disabled people continued to die due to her department’s decisions, policies and procedures.
Among them was Sophia Yuferev, a talented artist who lived with significant mental distress and had been living on a sandwich a day for the last few months of her life, after both her employment and support allowance and her personal independence payment had been stopped by Coffey’s department. She is believed to have died in October 2021.
Another was Philip Pakree, who died on Boxing Day 2020, and whose partner had warned that he was too ill to undergo an upcoming benefit assessment that had left him “distraught” and “devastated”.
And DNS has reported how a disabled woman left traumatised by the daily demands of universal credit took her own life last year, just four days after being told she would need to attend a face-to-face meeting with a work coach.
DWP has also been forced to admit repeatedly breaching the Equality Act after a disabled man was left needing hospital treatment three times for suicidal thoughts caused by months of failures by DWP advisers and jobcentres, following a new claim for universal credit he registered in February 2020.
DWP declined to comment on Schofield misleading the committee.
But a spokesperson said in a statement: “We support millions of people every year and our priority is they get the benefits to which they are entitled as soon as possible, and to ensure they receive a supportive and compassionate service.
“In the minority of instances where this doesn’t happen, we have established procedures to investigate and learn lessons through, for instance, the serious case panel and internal process reviews.”
12 January 2023
ALLFIE to build new coalition on fight for inclusive education
The disabled people’s organisation leading the fight for inclusive education in the UK is building a new coalition of allies and supporters to end segregation and push for mainstream education for all disabled people.
The Alliance for Inclusive Education (ALLFIE) is working to build a coalition of disabled activists and allies who see the fight for inclusive education as a social justice and human rights issue.
ALLFIE hopes the coalition will draft new legislation on inclusive education and push for it to be introduced in parliament.
It is recruiting a new member of staff to help build the coalition, and set up a young disabled people’s parliamentary group.
Among the areas the coalition will need to address, says ALLFIE, are the lack of funding and support for disabled children in mainstream settings, which forces parents to seek places in segregated special schools and colleges, and the disproportionate number of disabled children excluded from mainstream schools and colleges for “behavioural” reasons.
Michelle Daley, ALLFIE’s director, said: “We know inclusion works, there are good examples of it working.
“But at the moment there is no meaningful investment or interest from government in making inclusion thrive and be sustainable.”
Mainstream schools are choosing the children they want to accept, she said, and often that means they refuse to accept disabled children, particularly those with high support needs.
She added: “The systems in place disproportionately affect children who are disabled and disabled children who are from the furthest marginalised communities.”
ALLFIE is also looking at links between segregated education and poverty, and the experiences of black and other global majority children.
Daley said: “We will make sure that the coalition looks at the causes and effects of segregation and links to social injustices.
“While the coalition will focus on segregated education as a social justice issue, it will also be rooted in intersectionality to challenge how discrimination around our identities and backgrounds is used to drive disabled people out of the mainstream education system.
“For example, children and young people who have significant impairments are more likely to be excluded from mainstream education, and children with significant impairments from a marginalised community are pushed furthest to the margins across all areas of society.
“The focus will be on education, but you can’t talk about education without talking about access to other areas of life that are needed in order for somebody to access education, such as independent living and health, because all of those things are interconnected.”
ALLFIE and other organisations supportive of inclusive education are awaiting the government’s response to a consultation on its special educational needs (SEN) review, which was published 10 months ago.
Daley said last year that the green paper was “steeped in social injustice and inequality”, omitted any reference to inclusive education as a human right, and was “riddled with biases towards segregated education for disabled children and young people”.
She warned then that key parts of the review were incompatible with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and would likely force some disabled children, particularly those with higher support needs, into segregated education.
She also said the green paper had erased intersectional injustices, by all but ignoring issues such as race, class and gender bias.
Daley said this week: “We are not excited about what the response will be, but it will give direction about where the government will be going.”
But she added: “None of the parties have done well on this.
“It is something that Labour must – not should – must take seriously.
“They have to be serious about this because too many disabled children and young people are being failed and let down by the system. Way too many.”
12 January 2023
Labour government will push for jobs for ‘not fit for work’ group, says Ashworth
Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary has attacked the “totally unacceptable” number of disabled people who return to work after being found not fit for work by the government’s assessment system.
In a major policy speech, Jonathan Ashworth said that only one in 25 of those in the support group of employment and support allowance (ESA) return to work every year, which was “a monumental waste of the talents of the British people”.
But he also appeared to blame those in the ESA support group for this “huge economic cost” which “undermines economic growth” and “leaves the taxpayer with an increased health-related benefit bill”.
This echoes comments made by Conservative and Labour politicians that repeatedly scapegoated disabled claimants for the country’s economic problems in the post-2010 austerity years.
There was no mention by Ashworth of the links between back-to-work pressure placed on disabled people by DWP over the last decade and the deaths of disabled claimants.
And he also failed to mention in his speech the years of calls by disabled activists, families and allies for an independent inquiry into deaths linked to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
In November, at a meeting with relatives of three disabled people who took their own lives because of DWP failings, he backed away from his previous commitment to an inquiry if Labour won power at the next general election.
Ashworth promised this week to reform the work capability assessment (WCA) regime, a process he said can be “arduous, lengthy, stressful”, pledging to take away the “fear and distrust” disabled people feel.
He said he wanted to “de-risk the journey into work” so those found eligible for out-of-work disability benefits after a WCA would be given a guarantee that they could return to the benefits they were on without another assessment if they started a job with the help of employment support and “things go wrong”.
Vicky Foxcroft, Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, later stressed that this support would be voluntary and was an “option” that could be rejected by the disabled person, with “no enforcement” if they refuse employment support.
And she told Disability News Service (DNS) that Ashworth “certainly” did not intend to scapegoat disabled people on out-of-work benefits.
Two days after his speech, the Times reported (paywall) government plans to reform the WCA in its long-awaited disability benefits white paper, which it said was now expected to be published within the next two months.
Following a briefing from a DWP source – likely in response to Ashworth’s speech – the Times said the white paper would “recommend reforming or scrapping” the WCA, and that ministers “want to remove what is described as a ‘perverse incentive to prove how sick you are’ and replace it with a system that encourages claimants to show what work they might be capable of taking”.
It said DWP was also considering allowing people to keep some of their out-of-work disability benefits for a period of time after returning to work.
Ashworth said in his speech – delivered at Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice – that it was a “scandal” that only one in 10 out-of-work disabled people were receiving any support to find employment.
But he also promised that a Labour government would take a “fundamentally different and new approach, where we prioritise wellbeing and security above all else when helping people into work”, with “quality, tailored support for those who want it”.
Ashworth also criticised the support provided by the government’s jobcentres and its outsourced employment programmes which he said were too often experienced as “a combination of benefit policing and one-size-fits-all exercises like CV-writing classes”.
He said a Labour government would “shift power and resources out of Whitehall” to ensure that it is “local people” who “design and shape” employment support so that it meets the “needs, challenges and opportunities of their communities”, replacing the current “confusing, fragmented, spaghetti junction of different programmes”.
He said this would be “delivered and fixed by partnership at local level between local authorities, public services, with the voluntary charity sector and the private sector”.
He said a Labour government would modernise jobcentres, which have “increasingly been seen as a place for policing benefit claimants”.
And he said it would reform the flawed Access to Work (AtW) system – where “shameful” waiting-lists have trebled and one of his disabled constituents has been told to expect a 26-week wait for an assessment – so a disabled person would be able to apply for AtW support without a job offer, and be given an “in principle” award indicating how much support would be available if they found a job.
DNS reported last month that more than 25,000 disabled people were waiting for their AtW applications to be dealt with, while the average clearance time for an application had risen in just 11 months from 32.5 days to 63.1 days.
Ashworth also confirmed that a Labour government would reform rather than scrap and replace universal credit.
He said the problems with universal credit were the “adequacy of the levels” and the “complexity” of the system.
But he failed to highlight repeated safeguarding concerns that have been raised about universal credit, including reports of claimants left traumatised and at least one suicide linked to the system.
Ashworth also stressed that benefit sanctions would not be scrapped and that there would be “rights and responsibilities running through the heart of social security”.
After listening to Ashworth’s speech, disabled researcher Mo Stewart – who has spent more than a decade researching DWP’s assessment system and its links with the insurance industry – wrote to Foxcroft with her concerns.
She said it was “deeply disturbing” that Ashworth had given his speech at the Centre for Social Justice, with its close links to former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith.
And she said the speech showed there was “little difference” between Labour and the Conservatives on universal credit and “the fatally flawed work capability assessment”.
Pointing to the death of Errol Graham, she said Ashworth “should be alert to the fact that the British public didn’t elect any government to starve to death claimants who are too ill to access the assessment centre, yet the DWP continue to use extreme sanctions which guarantees starvation when enforced for several weeks”.
And she said Labour appeared to have again “failed to comprehend the fear generated by the DWP” among chronically ill and disabled claimants.
Stewart said: “Persecuting these people by harassing them to find employment when catastrophically ill, whilst claiming this psychological tyranny is some form of ‘help and support’, is disturbing, and is a continuation of the preventable harm created by the present social policies which will be linked to more deaths in the future.”
12 January 2023
DWP’s failure to sign discrimination agreement ‘is totally unacceptable’
The most senior civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been told that the continuing failure to sign a legal agreement that would force his department to improve its treatment of disabled claimants is “totally unacceptable”.
It is now nine months since the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it expected DWP to sign a section 23 legal agreement – under the Equality Act 2006 – by the summer of 2022.
Such an agreement would commit DWP to addressing the discrimination faced by disabled benefit claimants, particularly those with mental distress and ill-health, and learning difficulties.
It follows more than a decade of deaths that have been closely linked to DWP’s actions and policies.
Peter Schofield, DWP’s permanent secretary, was questioned yesterday (Wednesday, watch from 10.32) when giving evidence to the Commons work and pensions committee about his department’s continuing failure to sign the agreement.
He said: “The conversations are going well. We are now talking about the specifics about what an agreement would look like, and the activities around it.
“The discussions are well advanced, so further discussions this month.”
But Debbie Abrahams, a Labour member of the committee, said: “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am, and the committee will be, at that response.
“It’s exactly the response that we had at the end of November… it looks as if the government is ignoring our equality legislation.
“This is a notice under the 2006 Equality Act. To come here and say the same thing is just totally unacceptable.
“This is about a notice to your department that there are grounds around discrimination of disabled people… what does that say to the millions of disabled people who rely on your department, what does it say to them?”
Schofield claimed DWP was “working really collaboratively and constructively” with EHRC, although he said the legislation stated that he could not discuss the conversations the two bodies were having.
He said senior EHRC figures were “happy with the conversations that we are having and the progress we are making”.
But Abrahams told him: “What is unacceptable is you say you’re working hard and it’s nine months on.”
She then highlighted figures reported last week by Disability News Service which showed that complaints about DWP that have been lodged with the Independent Case Examiner (ICE) shot up by nearly 70 per cent last year.
Schofield said cases taken up by ICE have “often been a while through the system as they’ve exhausted our own complaints process”.
He said that although complaints to ICE had risen, complaints to DWP had fallen.
He said: “This is all part of trying to make sure… we are a large organisation, Ms Abrahams, but we need to make sure that those feedback loops work, that we are understanding and learning where things… and things sadly have gone wrong, and I want to put them right, and we’re doing everything we can to put them right.
“The work of the Independent Case Examiner is part of helping us put things right.”
But Abrahams told him: “I seriously don’t think I’m the only one on this committee who has concerns.
“I would like to think that I won’t be asking questions on this in the future, but I fear I will.”
EHRC had not commented on Schofield’s claims by noon today.
12 January 2023
Minister for disabled people fails to sign up to his own disability employment scheme
The minister for disabled people and the work and pensions secretary have both failed to sign up to their department’s discredited disability employment scheme, Disability Confident.
The latest update to Disability Confident membership shows that neither Tom Pursglove nor Mel Stride have yet signed up, more than two months after they were appointed as work and pensions ministers.
Disability Confident was launched in 2013, while Pursglove has been an MP since May 2015, and Stride since May 2010.
The much-criticised scheme aims to encourage employers to “think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain and develop disabled people”.
But in November 2016, DWP was declared a Disability Confident “leader” – the highest of the scheme’s three levels – days before it was found guilty of “grave or systematic violations” of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
In July 2020, a company that bragged of being a Disability Confident leader sacked more than 50 disabled staff when it fell into administration, and then hired mostly non-disabled agency staff to replace them.
And in October 2018, the government-funded British Council, which is responsible for promoting the UK’s culture and education abroad, asked an employment tribunal to allow it to dodge its Equality Act duty not to discriminate against disabled people, despite being a member of Disability Confident.
In the same year, nearly 7,000 employers that signed up to Disability Confident promised to provide just 4,500 new jobs for disabled people between them, less than one per employer.
Pursglove’s three predecessors as disability minister, Claire Coutinho, Chloe Smith and Justin Tomlinson, are all members of the scheme.
Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, is also a Disability Confident member.
Former work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey eventually signed up, after her failure to join the scheme was exposed by Disability News Service (DNS) in October 2020, more than a year after she had been appointed secretary of state.
Other current and former DWP ministers who scrabbled to sign up after DNS began asking questions about ministerial commitment to the scheme in March 2020 included Will Quince, Esther McVey, Mark Harper and Maria Miller.
One notable former DWP minister who has never signed up to the scheme is Iain Duncan Smith, even though he helped launch it as work and pensions secretary in 2013 and, like other ministers, employs staff to help with his duties as an MP.
Pursglove and Stride had both failed to comment by noon today (Thursday).
A DWP spokesperson refused to comment.
12 January 2023
Disabled gig economy workers ‘must do hours of unpaid work to cope with oppression’
Disabled people forced into employment in the “gig economy” have to carry out significant levels of unpaid work to cope with the disability-related oppression and exploitation they face, new research has found.
Austerity measures, uncertain working conditions, distrust and suspicion from employers and within the social security system, and increased social care charges, combine to create barriers that they need to deal with to stay working.
These barriers mean they carry out hours of unpaid extra work every week, just to maintain their job, says the research.
The conclusions come in early findings from The Politics of Disablement and Precarious Work, a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and carried out by Ioana Cerasella Chis, a disabled doctoral researcher in the University of Birmingham’s School of Government.
She interviewed disabled people who work in areas including retail, catering, social care, journalism and healthcare, with work arrangements including freelance, internships, payment by results, zero hours contracts and short-term contracts.
Disabled people who took part in her research reported high levels of uncertainty – “precarity” – about their pay, their rights, and whether reasonable adjustments would be made for them by employers.
One participant, who works in the third sector, said: “Even though I’m in a less precarious living situation than I have been previously, I think the damage that it’s done to my psyche, or the damage that it’s done to my ability to relax or to rest is that I feel very kind of on edge at times.”
Research participants also spoke of the energy they used up responding to professionals, friends, colleagues and family who misunderstood and disbelieved their experiences as disabled people.
One participant said of their family: “They think I have free time, rather than the reality that is running around, travelling, trying to flit between different classes and jobs and trying to fit in lesson prep, studying, being ill, and rest.”
Most of the research participants spoke of negative experiences of the social security system, including having their benefits sanctioned, assessors lying in their reports, and the process making them feel suicidal.
Many of them said they were “actively trying not to claim social security due to the harrowing experiences they (or people close to them) had in the past”, said Chis.
And those who did use social security had to “adhere to the demands of their Job Coaches to do job searches, apply for particular jobs, or leave their previous careers behind”.
The coaches were “acting as if they were participants’ managers”, she said, which left them, in effect, “working for the state, for free”.
This and other unpaid work takes place at the expense of activism, volunteering, mutual support, organising* and resting.
None of the 27 disabled people who took part in the research said they had enough time to rest.
A dozen of the interviewees kept diaries over eight weeks and all 12 said they wished they had more time to rest, often so they could prepare for the next day of work.
All 27 participants said they believed unions should do more to represent the interests of disabled workers in the gig economy.
Amy Wells, communications manager at National Survivor User Network (NSUN), said: “Issues relating to work have a huge impact on those living with mental ill-health, distress and trauma.
“NSUN members have told us that they are vulnerable to exploitation or discrimination at work due to disclosures around their mental health.
“Precarious and insecure work functions to keep people in the ‘poverty trap’, leaving them without a stable income to pay for food, bills, and safe housing, let alone small luxuries that could improve their wellbeing.
“On top of this, the hostile and dehumanising social security system continues to fail people and compound – or cause – distress.
“It is refreshing to see arguments arising from this research that focus on radically changing the nature of work for the better.”
Chis said her research showed that the idea that disabled people who were unemployed or worked in the gig economy were “unproductive” was false.
She said: “The fewer resources and means for support one has, the more work they are forced to do themselves, on their own.
“This situation leaves disabled people with little time and resources to rest, resist, support themselves and others, and organise.”
She told Disability News Service: “I seek to highlight the complexity and nature of the work that disabled people constantly undertake, resist, or subvert – both when they are in precarious employment and when they are unemployed.
“I hope that the participants’ insights and the project’s analysis might be useful for future disability-related discussions, campaigning, and activism** – especially if such campaigns argue for the necessity and urgency of having more time, resources, energy, and infrastructures for resting, supporting ourselves and others, and organising collectively to change society.
“Some forms of work need to be altered or completely abolished (such as, for instance, the unnecessary work of doing job searches in order to access social security).”
*Collective work aimed at challenging oppression and exploitation, for example through disabled people’s organisations, trade unions and renters’ unions
**She can be contacted through her website
12 January 2023
DWP fights watchdog ruling that it must release secret benefit deaths reviews
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is refusing to release up to 30 redacted reports into the deaths of benefit claimants, despite being told to do so by the information commissioner.
Following the commissioner’s decision, ministers have appealed to the information rights tribunal to try to prevent the internal process reviews (IPRs) being released to Disability News Service (DNS).
The IPRs will show recommendations made by DWP’s own civil servants – in secret reports completed between April 2019 and September 2020 – on how to improve safety and reduce the number of suicides and other deaths of disabled people claiming benefits.
The DNS bid to secure the information was made in September 2020, but DWP has been resisting its release for more than two years.
It argues that releasing the reports would interfere with the formation or development of government policy.
DNS has argued that releasing the recommendations made by the internal process reviews (IPRs) – previously known as peer reviews – is vital in ensuring DWP can be held to account for how it has responded to deaths linked to the social security system.
The information commissioner decided in October that DWP had “failed to consider the strong public interest in the timely understanding, and scrutiny of, the recommendations made in the IPRs” and that releasing them would “allow scrutiny of whether the actions taken were sufficient or timely enough to prevent the harm identified occurring again”.
The commissioner said he had decided there was “a strong public interest in understanding DWP’s approach to preventing future errors and safeguarding issues”.
The decision should have meant that ministers released between 20 and 30 IPRs that were completed between March 2019 and September 2020 and have until now been kept secret.
But DWP has appealed against the information commissioner’s decision.
The case will be heard later this year by the information rights tribunal.
John Pring, editor of DNS, has joined the case, which will allow him to make representations to the tribunal and respond to evidence submitted by DWP.
A spokesperson for DWP said it could not comment because of the ongoing legal action.
It is the latest episode of a near decade-long battle by DNS to force DWP to release information about deaths linked to flaws in the benefits system.
The tribunal previously ruled in 2016 that redacted versions of reviews carried out between 2012 and 2014 should be released.
But in recent years, particularly under the last work and pensions secretary, Therese Coffey, the department has tried to rely on exemptions contained within the Freedom of Information Act to prevent the release of further reviews.
The reviews that have been released have revealed key safety failings by the department.
The first batch of reviews, when they were eventually released in 2016 after a 21-month legal battle, showed that at least 13 reports had explicitly raised concerns about the way that “vulnerable” benefit claimants were being treated by DWP.
Another review obtained by DNS, in 2018, helped show how DWP had been forced to soften the “threatening” tone of the agreement that universal credit claimants must sign to receive their benefits.
And in December 2020, another freedom of information request allowed DNS to show that DWP staff had had to be repeatedly reminded what to do when claimants said they may take their own lives, following reviews into as many as six suicides.
Those reviews suggested that a series of suicides between 2014 and 2019 were linked to the failure of DWP staff to follow basic rules that had been introduced in 2009.
12 January 2023
Other disability-related stories covered by mainstream media this week
Thousands of NHS patients in England will be moved into care homes as part of the government’s plan to ease unprecedented pressure on hospitals. The NHS is being given £250 million to buy thousands of beds in care homes and upgrade hospitals amid a winter crisis. The move aims to free up hospital beds so patients can be admitted more quickly from accident and emergency to hospital wards: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64204367
Terminally-ill people are calling on the UK government to start paying their state pensions early so they can enjoy what is left of their lives and tackle a “cost of dying” crisis. People of working age who are unlikely to survive long enough to claim their state pension say the change would cost little more than the amount lost each year to erroneous pension payouts by the Department for Work and Pensions. Those of working age who die are twice as likely to spend their final year of life in poverty compared with people of pension age, says charity Marie Curie: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/10/terminally-ill-people-urge-uk-government-to-pay-pensions-early
Former Great Britain blind football captain David Clarke says he is “thrilled” to be appointed as the new chief executive of the British Paralympic Association. Clarke represented England 144 times, scoring a record 128 goals, and competed at three Paralympics. He will succeed Mike Sharrock, who steps down in February after more than four years in the role: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/disability-sport/64238708
12 January 2023
News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com
