DWP’s treatment of disabled people under Tories was ‘terrible and inexcusable crime’, says MP

The way the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has treated disabled people in the last 15 years “will go down in history as a terrible and inexcusable crime”, MPs were told this week during a debate on the new government’s budget.

Apsana Begum – who lost the Labour whip in July after voting to remove the two-child benefit limit – said there was “extensive evidence about the serious harm caused to people subjected to dehumanising assessments and sanctions, including reports of deaths* directly related to the social security regime”.

She called for a “long-term overhaul of the social security system”, which she said was “not fit for purpose”.

The independent MP also told the Commons that Labour’s commitment to deliver the same level of savings on disability benefits as the last government had planned was “more than alarming”.

She spoke out after chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged in last week’s budget to “reduce the benefits bill” and “ensure that welfare spending is more sustainable”.

Reeves said last week that the government would “deliver” the same cuts to spending as the Conservative government had aimed to make through tightening the work capability assessment.

Those changes would have been introduced next year and would have seen 424,000 disabled people lose their entitlement to extra support of up to £4,900 a year by 2028-29, cutting spending by £2.8 billion in the four years to 2028-29.

It is not yet clear whether the Labour government will introduce those changes, or if it will make the savings elsewhere.

Begum was not the only MP to refer to the impact of the last government’s welfare reforms on disabled people.

Labour’s Emily Darlington, MP for Milton Keynes Central, reminded MPs on Monday that under previous Conservative governments, disabled people had taken their own lives due to welfare reform.

She said that 14 years of “failure” had also led to “three million people using food banks, more than 700,000 children plunged into poverty, mortgage costs nearly doubled, the worst pay rises since the 1950s… mental health worse than at any time on record, more people sleeping rough and more families without their own home”.

She said the Conservative party continued “to deny, to justify and to refuse to apologise to those people right across the country and in my constituency”.

Labour’s Neil Coyle challenged former Conservative work and pensions secretary Mel Stride to explain why he had insisted there would be no investigation of DWP by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into its unlawful treatment of disabled benefit claimants.

Stride had repeatedly insisted that DWP would reach a legal agreement with EHRC over allegations of discrimination in its benefits assessment processes.

The commission finally took the step to launch an investigation in May after discussions with the department that lasted more than two years and were supposed to lead to a legally-binding section 23 agreement that would have forced it to take action to address its discrimination.

Stride, who was this week appointed shadow chancellor by the new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, did not answer the question, telling Coyle instead: “I stand by our record when I was secretary of state for work and pensions, particularly on the support that the department gave to the disabled, not least the results that we achieved in encouraging and helping them into work, which is the best possible outcome.”

During Monday’s debate, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall again spoke of “near-record levels of people trapped out of work due to long-term sickness” and the government’s plan “to drive down fraud and error in the welfare system”, including its controversial fraud, error and debt bill.

And she told MPs that her employment white paper, which is expected to be published later this month, would describe the “biggest reforms to employment support in a generation”, and “help us meet our ambition to achieve an 80 per cent employment rate” and “turn what is in reality a department for welfare into a genuine department for work”.

Deirdre Costigan, Labour MP for Ealing Southall, said she had visited her local jobcentre last month, and asked staff what support they could offer disabled people to return to work, but she said they “did not have an answer”.

She said: “As a trade unionist, I represented disabled workers for many years.

“So many of them wanted to work but were pushed out of their job because there was no support.

“There are three million people off work on a long-term sickness absence.

“Many would love to work, but the health service is not set up to support them and jobcentres do not have the right tools to help.”

She said Kendall’s plan to “bring jobcentres, careers services, skills providers and health services together will make a huge difference”.

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

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