DWP’s unlawful silence on ‘critical friend’ report raises questions over minister’s transparency pledge

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has unlawfully failed to respond to a request to see a secret paper on the department’s safeguarding failures, casting doubt on a minister’s pledge to open DWP to “public scrutiny”.

The “critical friend” paper was written four years ago by Conservative minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe and appears to be a report analysing the department’s safeguarding strategy.

It is likely to discuss the links between the department’s actions, policies and practices and the deaths and other harm caused to countless disabled benefit claimants.

But despite Disability News Service (DNS) submitting a request for a copy of the report on 1 April, DWP’s freedom of information team has not even responded to the request, or to a follow-up email on 12 May.

Both emails received automated confirmations that they had been received.

Public bodies have a legal duty to respond to freedom of information requests within 20 working days (about a month).

DWP’s actions have cast further doubt on the pledge of Sir Stephen Timms, Labour’s minister for social security and disability, that he would “open up what is going on in the Department for Work and Pensions to public scrutiny”.

Despite Sir Stephen’s transparency pledge, his department continues to prevent the release of vital documents.

It is fighting at least two information rights tribunal cases, one involving recommendations made about the flawed universal credit system by DWP’s secret internal process reviews, and another seeking the release of a DWP paper “detailing the impact of errors on vulnerable customers”.

DWP is also fighting the release of a transcript of a training session on human rights law delivered to DWP staff by a government lawyer in November 2023.

The existence of the “critical friend” paper only emerged when DNS obtained a memo that proved it was former Conservative work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey who banned her department from using the term “safeguarding” in February 2021.

That memo was titled “Readout of meeting with the SoS department’s response to Baroness Neville Rolfe’s critical friend paper”.

Among those who attended the meeting were senior civil servants with responsibility for service excellence, customer experience and safeguarding strategy.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe worked in John Major’s policy unit when he was prime minister and was more recently a Conservative minister in departments including the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe had not responded to a request to comment by noon today (Thursday).

DWP had also not responded by noon today.

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