Kendall ignores question on why she shared platform with company linked to DWP deaths

Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall has ignored a question on why she shared a platform at her party’s annual conference with an outsourcing giant linked to the deaths of disabled benefit claimants.

Kendall was speaking at the fringe event on “the future for work”, hosted by the discredited US multinational Maximus and the centre-left thinktank, the Fabian Society.

Maximus has been closely linked to the deaths of claimants over the last 10 years, including those of Jodey Whiting, Alan McArdle, Philip Pakree and Roy Curtis*.

Towards the end of Monday’s fringe event, Disability News Service (DNS) asked Kendall whether – in the light of such deaths – Maximus was the right company to be telling the government and Labour party members about the future of work.

But instead of asking Kendall to respond, Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabians, who was chairing the event, said he would ask Maximus UK president Dr Paul Williams to “very quickly respond” instead.

After Williams had spoken, Kendall was asked by Harrop for her “closing comments”.

She did not answer the Maximus question, even though DNS had made it clear it was directed at her.

In his response, Williams had said: “I’m not sure that I recognise that characterisation.”

He insisted that Maximus were “credible partners” because of their work supporting “people with disabilities” through Remploy.

He said Maximus had carried out assessments for about 10 million people in the last decade and took “tremendous pride in the way we seek to personalise those assessments, make them detailed and thorough where needed and try to support people through the process”.

He said: “I think we have actually got a wonderful track record for that, and I am very proud of my team.”

After the event, Harrop insisted that – despite his asking Maximus to comment on the question and then not asking Kendall to answer it – she had had “the opportunity to do so”.

There have been many concerns raised about Maximus since it took over delivering work capability assessments (WCAs) from Atos in 2015, in addition to its links to a number of deaths.

In August 2015, Alan McArdle died from a fatal heart attack after being told DWP was threatening to sanction his benefits.

Maximus had reported him for failing to attend appointments intended to move him towards work, as part of the government’s Work Programme, despite being told about his severe ill-health.

Maximus also failed to act on a request from Jodey Whiting for her WCA to be carried out at home, even though it knew of her history of significant mental distress; she later took her own life after her benefits were stopped when she missed her assessment.

A third death linked to Maximus was that of Philip Pakree, who died on Boxing Day 2020.

Maximus had been warned of his serious health conditions but told him he would have to be assessed or it would affect his benefits, telling his partner: “It’s been delayed once, we are not delaying it again.”

He died in his sleep after becoming nearly hysterical with distress.

Comments about Maximus were also scrawled in red ink on official letters found after the suicide of Roy Curtis in late 2018.

A folder of letters found in Curtis’s flat after his body was discovered in August 2019 showed he had written desperate messages about his disability benefits “nightmare”.

In 2016, Labour MP Louise Haigh – now the transport secretary – attacked the track record, ethics and even criminal behaviour of Maximus in delivering public contracts in the US, during a debate on the WCA.

Haigh also highlighted what she described as a “disconcerting pattern of behaviour” by Maximus in the UK since taking over the WCA contract from Atos the previous year, with “an alarming trend of cases being rejected based on factual errors or even – I hesitate to say this – falsification”.

From this month, Maximus has become one of four outsourcing companies that will carry out both WCAs and personal independence payment assessments across the country, after DWP awarded the quartet £2.8 billion-worth of contracts under the last government.

Kendall did not provide any fresh insights this week into how Labour intends to reform employment support.

Two months ago, she announced that she wanted her department to move from being “a department for welfare” to becoming “a genuine department for work”.

She made those comments while helping to launch a report that focused strongly on the need to push more people with long-term health conditions into work and which included a controversial recommendation for DWP to introduce a “duty to engage” with employment support.

Labour will publish an employment white paper this autumn, and it is set to reveal its plans for disability benefits next spring.

Kendall told Monday’s fringe meeting that she believed that “there is clear evidence that good work is good for mental health”.

She said the government needed to “turn the tide on the fact that we are a sicker nation, which we are”, and that “work, health, skills are all joined up and I think that has absolutely got to be done at the local level”.

She said the last government “reduced welfare reform to a story about cuts to benefits and what the tapers are”, and she added: “We have got a completely different approach from the Conservatives.

“Just as in the NHS, you end up spending too much on the consequences of failure, failure to intervene early or the failure to provide more positive support in the community, the same as is happening in DWP.

“We are paying the price for not having put in place better systems of support for people.”

She also spoke of the “culture of fear” of losing benefits if a job does not work out.

She added: “I am under no illusions about how hard it could be to change the culture.

“What the Tories did was write people off, blame them to grab an easy headline and then make their lives miserable.

“They talked about shirkers and it seems to be the only people shirking their responsibility were the Tories.

“If what they did was successful, we wouldn’t have a record number of people out of work due to long-term sickness.”

*The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, by DNS editor John Pring, is published by Pluto Press 

Picture: Liz Kendall speaking at the fringe, watched by Andrew Harrop (centre) and Dr Paul Williams

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