The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is again facing cover-up allegations after suggesting that it has destroyed reports showing why it weakened guidance on when to investigate suicides of benefit claimants.
Once again, our friends over at Disability News Service (DNS) have been successful with a freedom of information request and have discovered that DWP have once more attempted to wriggle out of their obligations. The department said:
“As discussions around Internal Process Reviews, their management and the criteria that relate to them, are operational in nature as opposed to policy based, there is no requirement for the Department to retain any such reports.”
It was revealed last month that DWP had weakened the rules on when to carry out an internal process review (IPR) in April 2021. Although, the previous year it had told the National Audit Office it would always carry out one of its secret reviews when it heard of a claimant’s death if they had died by suicide, even if there were no allegations that DWP’s actions had contributed to that death.
However, figures obtained through another freedom of information request have shown that on at least four occasions in 2022-23 – as a result of the new rules – the department failed to carry out an IPR when told of the suicide of a claimant.
For more than a decade, DNS has been revealing how DWP has covered-up evidence of links between its actions and the deaths of claimants, and how it has repeatedly tried to delay evidence of those links being released.
Read the full DNS report here.
Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software
A sign upon the wall identifies the location as being a room within the DWP. A white male in a grey suit is throwing documents headed ‘claimants suicide report’ into a burning container. Alongside of him is an Asian woman sat at a computer. She is looking back at the man who is saying to her: “And once you’ve scrubbed the hard drive it’ll be a case of reports – what reports!”
Crippen Cartoons 