Lib Dems want to use new Hillsborough Law to force DWP to release secret reports into deaths

The Liberal Democrats are set to try to use the government’s new Hillsborough Law to force the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to release secret reports into the deaths of disabled benefit claimants.

For years, the department has refused to hand bereaved relatives the internal process reviews (IPRs) it carries out into deaths that have been linked to its actions and failures.

It releases reviews only when ordered to do so by a coroner, or a court, or very rarely on other occasions – there is no record of it doing so in such circumstances – because it insists they are intended for learning purposes within the department.

This week, Disability News Service (DNS) has reported DWP’s latest refusal to release an IPR – or even to say if such a review was carried out – to a family, this time following the death of Jodey Whiting (see separate story).

Her mother, Joy Dove, is in her ninth year of campaigning for justice for her daughter, who took her own life in February 2017.

In a letter to Dove, DWP said IPRs were “internal retrospective investigations focused on organisational learning” and “often contain sensitive personal information about claimants” and so “could be considered a breach of privacy”, even though the claimant is dead.

The letter, from the Government Legal Department, said DWP was “working towards a more open approach to sharing findings and learning from IPRs”, but this is believed to refer only to anonymised recommendations made by the reviews rather than the facts they uncover.

DNS reported in June that a DWP director who gave evidence at the second inquest into Jodey Whiting’s suicide claimed she didn’t know whether an IPR had been carried out and would have to ask colleagues.

The minister for social security and disability, Sir Stephen Timms, came into his post last year pledging to increase transparency within the department.

But he has so far refused to change the department’s position, even though adult safeguarding reviews – sometimes examining the same deaths as IPRs – are released to relatives, and are published anonymously.

Now Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesperson, has pledged to use the government’s new public office (accountability) bill, otherwise known as the Hillsborough Law, to force DWP to publish IPRs and release them to families.

This is because the new bill includes a legal duty on public authorities and public officials “to act with candour, transparency and frankness”.

In an interview with DNS at his party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, Darling said he wanted the bill to produce a “culture change” within DWP and the whole of Whitehall, and that he intends to ask parliamentary questions about how the release of IPRs should be part of that.

He said it should be the same approach as in the aviation industry when there are near misses and “things have gone wrong”.

Otherwise, he said, “how can you expect the rest of the organisation to learn from it and the rest of society to learn where things have gone wrong?”

*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

Picture: Steve Darling (centre) speaking at a fringe event at the conference

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