DWP make tens of thousands of life-threatening errors, while planning more interaction with disabled claimants

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) staff are making tens of thousands of potentially fatal errors every month when dealing with disabled people’s universal credit claims, just as the department prepares to increase its level of interaction with claimants.

Last week’s disability benefits green paper and consultation, Pathways to Work, said DWP would change the current universal credit system from one “based on almost no contact” with disabled people found not fit for work “to one based on keeping in touch and generating opportunities to help people improve their health and employment prospects”.

But three new reports obtained by Disability News Service (DNS), following a freedom of information request, show DWP staff are already failing to keep disabled claimants of universal credit safe, and are making repeated blunders in their day-to-day work, even before the government increases their workload and responsibilities.

The reports analyse whether DWP staff are meeting 17 customer support standards (CSS), which were introduced by the last government to “improve the experience of customers with complex needs and significantly reduce instances of serious cases by providing the right support at the right time”.

The reports admit that the impact of CSS errors “can affect customer life chances” and “can negatively affect departmental reputation”.

DWP has been carrying out these checks for nearly two years, as part of its regular “quality assurance checks” on how staff are dealing with new claims, changes of circumstances and other interactions with claimants.

But the three quarterly reports – from June, September and December 2024 – also show that DWP has now made it impossible to see exactly how often DWP civil servants are making potentially fatal blunders.

Earlier versions of the reports, issued monthly, showed how many cases involving CSS were being checked every month in each category, and therefore what proportion of these checks involved safeguarding errors.

But since welfare rights expert Owen Stevens, from Child Poverty Action Group, first obtained the monthly reports under the Freedom of Information Act, DWP has now replaced the reports with quarterly versions and has stopped showing how many cases they are sampling.

This means – in DWP’s latest attack on transparency – that it is impossible to estimate how often staff are making safeguarding mistakes.

The latest report still shows 284 occasions on which DWP staff failed to record that a universal credit claimant had “complex needs” in the section showing if they need additional support.

And there were 476 failures around additional support and homelessness, while staff failed to record a summary of the claimant’s additional support needs on 143 occasions.

Although the report is not entirely clear, it appears these figures show a running total over two quarters.

The report also shows that staff failed 240 times to record that a disabled claimant had accessibility needs in the “additional support” section.

It is impossible to say from the report how large the sample was, although a previous monthly report checked a sample of 1,653 universal credit (UC) claims for CSS failings.

But it is likely that if scaled up across the country – with tens of thousands of new health and disability UC claimants every month – these blunders are likely to be happening many thousands of times a month.

DWP has previously argued that it is “misleading” to suggest that its staff are making thousands of potentially fatal errors, because in “the unlikely event an error occurs, we have safeguards in place to resolve them swiftly and take action to reduce the likelihood of it re-occurring”.

But the new figures suggest that the errors keep re-occurring, even though it is now impossible to estimate how frequently this is happening across the country.

Recent history shows DWP does not have “safeguards in place” to resolve errors “swiftly”.

The fatal impact of such errors was demonstrated two years ago by the death of Nazerine Anderson, from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire.

Among the errors made in her case, DWP was repeatedly told of her mental distress and suicidal ideation, but her work coach failed to record her “vulnerability” on her profile, while also failing to record updated information about her repeated visits to hospital on the relevant part of the system.

Last May, DNS reported how a survey by the Commons work and pensions committee found two-thirds of DWP staff did not have enough time to deal with safeguarding concerns “carefully” and “correctly”, despite years of deaths of benefit claimants linked with DWP’s actions and failings.

And in December 2023, a dossier of evidence submitted by the PCS union to DWP showed the department to be a failing organisation in a “state of crisis” and facing a “near collapse” of its benefits systems, with staff accusing DWP of “deliberate neglect” and revealing that claimants in vulnerable situations were “falling through the gaps” in the system.

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