Some quotes from the article:
Evidence stretching back more than a decade shows how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) repeatedly ignored recommendations to improve the safety of its disability benefits assessment system, leading to countless avoidable deaths of disabled claimants.
Ministers and civil servants were “ruthless” and “reckless” in forcing through their new “fitness for work” test and refusing to abandon it, even after they were told of the harm it was causing.
His report raised serious concerns about the role played by the work capability assessment in the suicide of Stephen Carré, a former software engineer from Bedfordshire. In his report, the coroner, Tom Osborne, said the “trigger” that led to Carré’s decision to take his own life had been “the rejection of his appeal that he was not fit for work”, and added: “I feel the decision not to seek medical advice from the claimant’s own GP or psychiatrist if they are suffering a mental illness should be reviewed.” Despite the coroner’s report, the department failed to make the necessary changes to the work capability assessment. Despite the coroner’s warning, and the advice of Professor Harrington, ministers publicly attempted to justify their plans through a series of high-profile statements that suggested – sometimes subtly, sometimes not quite so subtly – that many recipients of incapacity benefit were scroungers and shirkers.
Spartacus was to produce the first major research report to provide multiple examples of the fatal impact of the WCA later that year, in its People’s Review of the Work Capability Assessment (PDF). The report detailed a string of cases involving claimants who had taken their own lives or otherwise died after being told they were fit for work, all of them in circumstances in which the WCA appeared to have been a factor in their deaths.
Their research showed how DWP staff and managers deliberately inflicted psychological harm on benefit claimants, engaged in unofficial sanctioning targets, and pushed disabled people into work despite the risk to their health.
One JCP worker described how staff would often treat claimants with “disrespect” and use psychological harm as a technique to reduce the number of people claiming benefits, “pushing them until they either just cleared off because they couldn’t take the pressure or they got sanctioned”.
An executive officer in another JobcentrePlus office also said that some staff tried to antagonise claimants in the hope that they would drop their claims.
While DWP denied at the time that there were any sanctioning targets, the former DWP staff interviewed for the research said there was increasing expectation “from above” to hand out sanctions, which led to the formation of “local target regimes”.
One JCP executive officer said staff would come into the canteen and say: “Well I’ve got my [sanctions] target for the week.”
One manager tried to persuade staff to sanction more claimants by telling them: “It’s your money! It’s your taxes that they’re living off! You know, you should be sanctioning them!”
The work coach told DNS she was aware of the many deaths of disabled claimants that have been linked to DWP’s actions over the last decade, including many who have taken their own lives. She said she was now “very concerned” that DWP’s new, even stricter, approach “might lead to more people taking their own lives”.
Following the inquest last year, Hayes wrote a prevention of future deaths report to work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey to warn her that other claimants could die if she did not make urgent changes to how DWP deals with such cases. In its response, DWP said it had no plans to make any changes to its policies or practices in response to the concerns she had raised. DWP’s response to this latest PFD report echoed its responses to many such deaths over the last decade. They have been characterised by a chilling refusal to express remorse, to accept that its systems are not working well, and to admit that it must improve.