DWP is broken and needs to be scrapped and replaced, say Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats have called for the “completely broken” Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to be scrapped and replaced with a new department that is “more supportive and inclusive” for benefit claimants.

The call has come from Steve Darling, one of the new intake of disabled MPs at last year’s general election, who speaks for his party on work and pensions issues.

He told Disability News Service (DNS) this week that it was clear that DWP was “completely broken” and could not be fixed.

He told DNS this week: “I’ve now drawn the conclusion that actually the DWP is just completely broken and we need to think about how we reshape our world, and could it be done in a different way that actually is more supportive and inclusive to people who claim benefits.”

Darling said he was clear DWP needed to be scrapped and replaced, and he was now working on “the model we replace it with, and how we can best seek change, because for many years now it has been a broken system”.

He also said he was “sympathetic” to a possible public inquiry into the links between DWP and the deaths of hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths in the post-2010 austerity years.

But he said he wanted to examine the “full implications” of such an inquiry and “immerse myself more in it and have confidence that it would be bringing the change that we need to see” before deciding whether to call for an inquiry.

Darling said the message from The Department* – the book written by DNS editor John Pring, which exposes the “violent government bureaucracy” within DWP that has led to so many deaths since 2010 – was that the culture within DWP continued to be a concern.

He said: “Clearly what’s portrayed within your book should give major cause for concern.

“One would hope that a public inquiry would result in significant change within that organisation, and hopefully even root and branch change, which I think we need to be seeing within the DWP, because it has been broken for so many years.”

He said the book showed there had also been a “toxic mix” between parts of the media and politicians “of a number of different colours” from the early 1990s onwards that led to the “demonizing of people who are on benefits when evidence clearly portrays that on a number of benefits the levels of fraud are minuscule”.

And, he said, there was “conflation between error and fraud, so that it is almost seen as the same”.

Darling has previously spoken out as a member of the Commons work and pensions committee about his concerns with the government’s Access to Work disability employment scheme.

He said he was “really worried that it is a system that is not performing”, and he pointed to a friend who is owed more than £3,000 by Access to Work for travel costs.

He also highlighted comments made by Sir Stephen Timms, the minister for social security and disability, about Access to Work, in which he suggested major changes to the scheme that would shift the cost of support towards employers and away from DWP.

Darling said he has heard from people who have attended roundtable meetings with ministers, and other sources close to the government, that although they have not used the word “cuts”, ministers appear to be planning “changes to the system where they are relying on employers to do much, much more”.

He said: “I shudder at what that actually means.

“They often describe it as the best kept secret; well, make it bloody well work and then we can actually get people into work because the issue is that we know that we’ve got a real challenge with finding enough people for some of the jobs that we’ve got out there, so we need to make sure that we support employers so they can have a bit more flexibility and then people can get into work.”

As well as the government’s imminent green paper on disability benefits and the “Pandora’s box  of challenges that will bring up for the disability community”, Darling said he is also focused on the government’s public authorities (fraud, error and recovery) bill, which will force banks to examine individuals’ accounts for potential breaches of benefit eligibility rules, and then pass that information to DWP.

Darling said that, although those currently in power in the UK government might be “reasonable people”, it was important to look at the recent election of Donald Trump and the subsequent “carnage” being done to government in the US.

This means there will need to be “genuine checks and balances” in the fraud and error bill, he said.

“While this may go through now with reasonable people in power, in ten years’ time, who knows what the politics of the UK will be.

“We need to make sure that there are genuine independent safeguards to protect people from those who have a really dodgy worldview around people with disabilities.”

Darling said he had not come into parliament as a new MP wanting to speak for his party on work and pensions issues, so the appointment last September had been a “bolt from the blue”.

But he said he believed that his personal experience of the benefits system, as a recipient of personal independence payment (PIP), and having disabled friends with similar experiences of benefits and DWP’s creaking Access to Work system, had helped equip him for the role.

*The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, DNS editor John Pring’s book on the years of deaths linked to DWP, is published by Pluto Press

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