Prime Minister Rishi Sunak giving his speech in central London on welfare reform, April 19, 2024
PM announces major plans to impose curbs on benefits
RISHI SUNAK was accused of launching a “full-on assault” on disabled people today after he announced major plans to impose fresh curbs on benefits.
The Prime Minister said an expected rise in benefits spending is “not sustainable” and vowed to “significantly reform” the system.
He announced a new consultation on personal independent payment (PIP), a non means-tested benefit that helps with extra costs caused by long-term disability or ill health.
Citing an increasing number of people are claiming PIP for anxiety and depression, Mr Sunak said a more “rigorous” approach will be introduced, and that “greater medical evidence” will be required to substantiate a claim.
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He pledged to “tighten” the work capability assessment so that “hundreds of thousands of benefit recipients with less severe conditions will now be expected to engage in the world of work.”
James Taylor of disability charity Scope said the plan “feels like a full-on assault on disabled people.”
He said: “These proposals are dangerous and risk leaving disabled people destitute.
“In a cost-of-living crisis, looking to slash disabled people’s income by hitting PIP is a horrific proposal.”
Disability Rights UK’s head of policy Fazilet Hadi accused the government of “targeting disabled people for a failing economy.”
She said: “The Prime Minister’s approach to systemic inequalities caused by government policies and underfunding of public services, is to further penalise, punish and threaten disabled people living on inadequate benefits.”
Dr Sarah Hughes, CEO of Mind, said: “We are deeply disappointed that the Prime Minister’s speech today continues a trend in recent rhetoric which conjures up the image of a “mental health culture” that has “gone too far”.
“This is harmful, inaccurate and contrary to the reality for people up and down the country. The truth is that mental health services are at breaking point following years of under investment with many people getting increasingly unwell while they wait to receive support.”
She added: “To imply that it is easy both to be signed-off work and then to access benefits is deeply damaging. It is insulting to the 1.9 million people on a waiting list to get mental health support, and to the GPs whose expert judgement is being called into question.”
Labour MP John Trickett offered an alternative solution: “Sunak would stop doctors from issuing ‘sick notes’ in effort to force ill people back to work. I have a 3-part proposal: 1) fully finance the NHS & cut waiting lists 2) an all-out drive to end poverty which is at the root of so much ill health 3) force bosses to pay living wage”.
The welfare system has taken another hit today via a ‘benefits crackdown’ in Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement. Since the ‘welfare reform’ of 2007, disabled people have been on the receiving end of these dehumanising and punishing policies that make people out as ‘undeserving’, prioritise work over people, and make life unlivable.
But we now have evidence the Department for Work and Pensions (DPW) knows its policies kill people. It has been repeatedly warned of this fact and has even confirmed it in its own research.
It took years of campaigning by disabled people to uncover this evidence, which largely comes in the form of DWP reviews into deaths of claimants.
Now it has been brought together as part of the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing Justice London. Since 2021, journalist John Pring and I have been creating a timeline – co-produced with disabled people – showing the links between welfare policy and disabled people’s deaths.
It also shows that not only is there often a delay between the introduction of a policy and the brutal impact it has on people’s lives, but that delay tactics are central to DWP’s weaponisation of time as a strategy to avoid accountability.
To make matters worse, most families of those who have died do not even know if a review has been carried out into their loved one’s death because the DWP has always argued this is private information – an argument found by an Information Rights Tribunal to be an error in law – and can’t be shared, not even with families.
The first family to see an IPR was Philippa Day’s. Philippa, known as Pip, took her own life in 2019 after her disability benefits were stopped.
In January 2021, the coroner at the inquest into Philippa’s death found 28 separate “problems” with the administration of the Personal Independent Payment (PIP) system contributed to her death – concluding these were not individual errors by DWP and its private sector contractor Capita but systemic flaws.
Pip’s sister Imogen told us, in an interview for the Deaths by Welfare podcast, that seeing the IPR “silenced my night-time questions, right before I was going to sleep… It made it incredibly clear that we as a family had done everything that we could have done, and that it was a governmental system that had let her down”.
“I really feel for families that still don’t have answers,” she said.
And Pip is not alone. It would later come to light, after a sustained (and continuing) Freedom of Information battle, that between 2014 and 2022, the DWP carried out approximately 220 of these reviews – formerly called peer reviews, now internal process reviews (IPRs).
After finally obtaining redacted versions of some of these, we found evidence of persistent and systemic issues across welfare policy, and evidence that welfare policy is life-threatening. The reviews also contained hundreds of recommendations, which the DWP has admitted having no system for tracking.
What makes DWP reviews into what it calls the ‘death of a customer’ important is that they are (supposedly) tools through which the DWP investigates the harms of its own policies. And yet, they are designed and carried out in a way that systemically hides any state accountability. And delays in releasing the reviews is another way the department can avoid being held accountable.
What we have discovered has been learnt slowly, largely through a mixture of FOIs, parliamentary questions, queries to the DWP press office and documents released through court cases or inquests. Many of the FOIs have been submitted by Disability News Service over the last nine years.
An investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO) on the information the DWP holds on benefit claimants who ended their lives by suicide, found the DWP does not identify patterns between people’s deaths, meaning that “systemic issues which might be brought to light through these reviews could be missed”.
The NAO also found access to the reports is restricted to the team handling them and the recommendations are not tracked or monitored, meaning the DWP “does not know whether the suggested improvements are implemented”.
These recommendations include repeated warnings that policies to assess people for out-of-work disability benefits were putting the lives of “vulnerable” claimants (likely to be mostly people with mental health conditions or learning difficulties) at risk.
Yes, the DWP’s own investigations were identifying policies as potentially life-threatening. The IPRs also showed a recurring pattern of staff failure to follow DWP’s suicide guidance, which was introduced in 2009.
Tactics used to delay the release of information include claims by the DWP that the time required to collect data, due to lack of centralised record-keeping, was too costly and not in the public interest.
This was used under Thérèse Coffey to block requests about how many inquests relating to benefits claimants who died by suicide her department had submitted evidence to, as well as requests to find out how many inquests had ruled DWP policies were partly responsible for the deceased person’s state of mind. In both of these cases, the information wasn’t shared due to “disproportionate cost”.
These reviews should be publicly available by default, and the DWP should be held publicly accountable to making the changes required.
Yet it may be that the IPR process is by design unable to apprehend government accountability in people’s deaths. IPR findings and recommendations come from within the system that kills people, and therefore may never be enough for full accountability or justice. While some ascribe people’s deaths to flaws in a system that needs reform, others see them as endemic to a system that needs dismantling and creating anew, with disabled people, and the analysis developed through lived experience, at the core.
