MP asks DWP why it ignored her pleas for help after constituent attempted suicide over sanction threat

A Labour MP has publicly asked the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) why it ignored her requests for help, after a constituent threatened with sanctions over her universal credit claim attempted to take her own life.

Rushanara Ali, the MP for Bethnel Green and Stepney in east London, said that “the fear of sanctions” had led to her constituent’s mental health deteriorating to the point that she made a suicide attempt.

The MP told DWP officials and the minister for social security and disability, Sir Stephen Timms, who were giving evidence in parliament yesterday (Wednesday), that delays in the department responding to such concerns can be “a matter of life and death”.

The Commons work and pensions committee was taking evidence on progress since it published a critical report that called for deep-rooted cultural change across DWP to address its “deficient” approach to safeguarding.

Ali (pictured) told DWP officials and Sir Stephen that she had been approached after her constituent’s mental health deteriorated while applying for universal credit.

The MP wrote three times to the department last month – on 10, 17 and 20 August – but received no “substantive response”.

She then wrote to Sir Stephen and again received no response.

She told Sir Stephen that the woman’s suicide attempt appeared to have been triggered by the department’s “mismanagement” of the assessment process and the handling of her case.

Ali said: “What I would like is for something to be done to ensure that it doesn’t require a member of parliament to write constantly in a critical case and then have to resort to going to the minister’s office.”

She said she had still not received a “substantive response” to her concerns.

She told Sir Stephen and the DWP officials: “The problem is that these sorts of cases are still unfortunately widespread.

“So can you tell us what action the department’s taking to deal with the interface between MPs and constituents, so that we can be assured that there are people in place in the department who are able to spot these very critical cases that could become very serious, or already are serious, that could be a matter of life and death, [so they] are actioned quickly?”

Sir Stephen apologised for the failure to respond to her letter to him and said there had been problems with delays in answering his letters from MPs but that this had “largely now been overcome”.

He said he would examine what had happened in this case but that it was “very much our aim” that DWP’s five-year safeguarding plan would “significantly improve the experience of people like the constituent who you’ve heard from”.

But Ali said that “cases like this show that the ‘do no harm position’ is not being followed”.

Sir Stephen told her there were “multiple checks” in place before a sanction is imposed but the department was “looking at testing more personalised approaches”, which he hoped would “overcome the problem that you’re describing”.

He said the department aimed to take “great care” when imposing sanctions on people who are “vulnerable”.

But Ali said the department must take into account a claimant’s vulnerability before imposing a sanction because “otherwise what we’re going to see is that the actions of the Jobcentre Plus administrators, officials, is actually doing harm, which clearly the state shouldn’t be doing”.

Her constituent is now believed to have left hospital and to be recovering at home.

Sir Stephen said earlier in the meeting that DWP had been working in the past year for a “big change in the culture of the department towards a more personalised and a more supportive approach”.

He said DWP had improved its approach to safeguarding and to supporting “vulnerable people” in the benefit system, while rolling out safeguarding training “widely across the department”.

He said DWP was also now tracking all safeguarding referrals that have come from disability benefit assessments “which we didn’t used to do” and was “developing mental health training to help staff do a better job in supporting vulnerable people who they’re dealing with”.

He said that 6,500 DWP staff had undergone “trauma-informed training”, which is now part of the induction for staff working in the jobs and careers service, and that DWP had started to publish recommendations for improvements made by the department’s internal process reviews (IPRs).

IPRs are carried out when there is a suggestion that DWP’s actions or failings may have negatively affected a claimant, and they have suffered serious harm, died, or attempted suicide.

He said: “We think it’s right that people should see what we’re learning from these cases so that everybody can kind of understand the sort of journey that we’re on.”

But he did not point out that DWP only began publishing these IPR recommendations after pressure from the information rights tribunal, following a complaint from Disability News Service (DNS) about its refusal to release the information.

Dr Gail Allsopp, who is about to step down from her post as chief medical adviser after it became clear that DWP was not planning to reappoint her for a further three-year contract, told the committee there had been an increase of more than 100 per cent over a year in confidence among DWP staff in asking for advice from her clinical team.

Dr Allsopp – who has played a central role in safeguarding improvements within the department and was praised in the meeting for her work by Sir Stephen and Neil Couling, DWP’s director general for services and fraud – said safeguarding had “changed quite substantially over the last year”.

During her three years in post, government publications – including this year’s clinical governance annual report – show she has led significant improvements to safeguarding across the department.

DNS was contacted this summer by a DWP staff member who expressed significant concerns about the decision not to renew Dr Allsopp’s contract and said they feared the decision to replace her was part of a plan to “water down safeguarding” within the department.

DWP confirmed this week that it had appointed Professor David Strain to replace her as chief medical adviser.

He joins DWP from the University of Exeter, the NHS and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

*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