DWP is ‘dysfunctional’ and needs major review, says Lib Dem Steve Darling

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is “dysfunctional” and needs to be the subject of a major review, according to the disabled MP who speaks for the Liberal Democrats on work and pensions.

Steve Darling said his first year as an MP and as the party’s spokesperson had convinced him of the major problems within DWP and the “broken” social security system.

He said a review would need to engage with disabled people and others with lived experience of the benefits system, and academics, because the benefits system should be co-designed with claimants.

In an interview with Disability News Service at his week’s Liberal Democrat party conference in Bournemouth (pictured), Darling also raised concerns about the new work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden.

He said McFadden appeared to be a “take no prisoners” and “driven” politician and an “enforcer”, and he raised concerns about his past comments about financial support for people with mental distress.

McFadden told Times Radio in March that he wanted benefit claimants with “mental health and depression and anxiety” to be “given support but not financial support”.

Darling also said that McFadden appeared to be a career politician who was lacking in “empathy and engagement and passion for people”, and that he seemed to be “a bit of a SPAD*-spawned apparatchik” who would “probably take no prisoners in driving forward with Starmer’s plans”.

He said he believed that the right-wing Reform UK was “worrying [the government] massively and I fear that they may lose their humanity for fear of Reform”.

Darling also said he had serious concerns about DWP forcing its disabled advisers to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

He said he and his wife had been forced to sign an NDA after winning a disability discrimination legal case and he said: “I really hate NDAs. They are meant to be there to protect intellectual property of commercial interests.

“One of the things that we need to see change on is the culture of DWP and having a more open and transparent approach.”

He said that “slapping NDAs on those who they are engaging with” sends a “negative” message.

Darling also called for the Commons work and pensions committee to investigate the unreliability of DWP statistics on “economic inactivity”.

DNS reported last week that the proportion of working-age disabled people in England who are “economically inactive” was not “spiralling” and may even have fallen over the last nine years, according to new official government statistics.

The new figures came from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, just as a leading expert, Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger, from King’s College London, published a blog which showed that DWP’s “raw statistics” on all out-of-work benefits – not just relating to disabled people – were “wildly misleading”.

Darling said he was “keen to suggest” an inquiry by the work and pensions committee into the use of these statistics.

He said an investigation would “either debunk” the figures used by DWP or prove their accuracy.

He said: “My real fear is that, in our now Trumpian world, [the far right] don’t need the facts to add up to make outlandish claims.

“The far right will just make up narratives for their own purposes and demonising others is part of their playbook and sadly people with disabilities and quite often people with hidden disabilities are in their crosshairs.”

He said that “unpicking” the claims and counter-claims behind the figures on economic inactivity should be “part of that push back against the far right that we need to be doing” because “otherwise that half-truth will be built on by the far right to demonise people with disabilities”.

*A SPAD is a ministerial special adviser

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