A coroner has linked the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and its universal credit benefit system with the death of a disabled woman, after its repeated failings and missed opportunities to protect her triggered a significant increase in her anxiety.
Coroner Fiona Butler is the second coroner in just three months to raise concerns about the safety of universal credit after the death of a claimant who took their own life.
She highlighted how DWP missed six opportunities to record the “vulnerability” of Nazerine (known as Naz) Anderson on its IT system while it was reviewing her universal credit claim, including failing to act on the mental distress she showed in phone calls.
It also repeatedly failed to act on requests to direct its telephone calls and letters to her daughter.
The review of her universal credit “continued to preoccupy her thoughts” and six days after receiving the final piece of correspondence from DWP, she took an overdose.
Although she did not intend to take her own life, the overdose caused irreversible damage to her liver, and she died a month later, on 19 June 2023, while receiving palliative care at Melton Mowbray Hospital.
Following an inquest earlier this month, Butler has now sent a prevention of future deaths (PFD) report to DWP, raising serious concerns about the department’s safeguarding failures.
Disability News Service (DNS) has now reported on three deaths of disabled people that have been closely linked with the safety of universal credit and its systemic flaws.
Three months ago, another coroner sent DWP a PFD report, calling on the department to take action to prevent those flaws leading to further deaths, this time following the suicide of Kevin Gale, from Penrith, Cumbria.
And in November 2022, DNS reported how a disabled woman left traumatised by the daily demands of universal credit took her own life just four days after being told she would need to attend a face-to-face meeting with a work coach. Her inquest has yet to take place.
The concerns raised by Butler in her PFD report also suggest that DWP has failed to learn key lessons from the death of Philippa Day, who died in October 2019.
That inquest, in January 2021, also led to a PFD report, with coroner Gordon Clow calling for changes to the personal independence payment system.
Clow had called for changes to the mental health training given to DWP’s call handlers and improvements to its poor record-keeping, and highlighted repeated failures to record on Philippa Day’s file that she needed additional support with her claim, while he also pointed to the failure to respond to the mental distress she displayed when she called a DWP telephone agent.
Naz Anderson, from Melton Mowbray, was admitted to Leicester’s Bradgate Mental Health Unit in December 2022 after a decline in her mental health that a consultant psychiatrist told the coroner was triggered by a review of her universal credit claim by DWP’s performance review team.
DWP had suggested she had been overpaid and would need to pay back the debt.
She was diagnosed with adjustment disorder, an “excessive reaction to stress that involves negative thoughts, strong emotions and changes in a person’s behaviour”.
But it took six months for the review to be completed and during that time DWP missed at least six opportunities to highlight her need for additional support on its universal credit system.
It failed to take this action “despite Naz being tearful and distressed on the telephone on more than one occasion and advising the DWP of information surrounding her mental health and her inability to cope”.
DWP also repeatedly failed to pass information between its performance review and universal credit case handling teams about the need to correspond with her daughter, a request made because “corresponding with Naz was of serous detriment to her mental health”.
Butler wrote: “This was a simple request and had been renewed by Naz during telephone calls and journal entries to the DWP.
“The request which had been made in writing by Naz’s daughter sat in another DWP computer system for a period of four months but even when uploaded to the main DWP computer system was not acted upon.”
In the four weeks before her overdose, the coroner wrote, she received two telephone calls asking for detailed information, a universal credit message through her online journal that she did not understand, and three letters warning her that the amount she owed was increasing.
Butler wrote in her PFD report: “Those mental health professionals who had worked with Naz throughout seven months in which her mental health had deteriorated gave evidence to me that the recurrent and predominant cause of Naz’s increased anxiety was the DWP performance review.”
She said DWP had given evidence to the inquest of plans “to introduce a number of changes”.
But she said DWP had not told her how its staff “were going to be trained, upskilled and refreshed in their knowledge” to ensure the issues she highlighted in the PFD report were not repeated “with other vulnerable individuals”.
Imogen Day, Philippa Day’s sister, told Disability News Service that it was “upsetting” to see more people suffering in similar ways to her sister.
She said: “It takes me back to Pip asking me to promise to fight for her in the event of her death and how there is still more work to be done to fulfil that promise.”
She added: “It is clear from the PFD report of Naz Anderson that insufficient changes have been made within the DWP for vulnerable claimants since Philippa’s death in 2019.
“Their cases are extremely similar, with missed opportunities to register both people as vulnerable.
“I am struck by how Naz’s daughter’s simple request to be an intermediary could not be acted on.
“The DWP heard extensively in Philippa’s inquest about the effect of receiving letters from the DWP on her mental health from her community psychiatric nurse and mental health team.
“Disability activists and advocates are aware of the fear of the [DWP] brown envelope and the significant impact this can have on a person’s mental health.
“I continue to hope for changes to prevent further suffering.”
John McArdle, co-founder of Black Triangle, said it was clear that “no lessons have been learned” by DWP, which had led to another life lost, and that PFD reports appeared to be something that DWP “can just throw in the bin”.
He said: “They don’t seem to have learned anything. They are repeating their mistakes and they are exacerbating the situation at speed.
“They just carry on regardless. They reject coroners’ findings. It’s very grim.”
He said he had given up trying to convince the Conservative party after 14 years in government, but he called on Labour to “acknowledge the empirical fact that these deaths are avoidable and that not to change their policies and systems accordingly [if they win power] will make them complicit in tens of thousands of further tragedies”.
Linda Burnip, co-founder of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), said: “This is yet another tragic and avoidable death of yet another disabled social security claimant.
“Universal credit has always been toxic and is set to be even more dangerous for disabled claimants in the future as medically unqualified jobcentre staff will have the powers to decide what a claimant can and can’t do in relation to seeking work.
“That, together with the horrific ramping up of the sanctions regime, means DPAC is convinced this will result in many more deaths of disabled people.”
She added: “DWP continue to fail disabled people and it is past time that the Equality and Human Rights Commission made them more accountable.”
DPAC is organising a protest outside DWP’s Caxton House headquarters in London at noon on Monday (4 March), in which it will call for an end to deaths connected to benefit claims.
It is part of a national day of action in opposition to the government’s “brutal and horrific social security reforms”, which will be linked to the social media hashtag #NoMoreBenefitDeaths.
DPAC hopes local groups and allies will organise actions across the UK, alongside the London protest.
DPAC said it was “gravely concerned” at government plans to intensify conditions and benefit sanctions imposed on claimants and to tighten the work capability assessment, which will see social security cuts for hundreds of thousands of disabled people and “new powers for unqualified work coaches in jobcentres”, who will decide what work-related activity should be carried out.
A DPAC spokesperson said: “Kicking the poor – particularly those in receipt of benefits – is still somehow viewed by party policy wonks on both sides as a vote winner, while the richest in our society have seen their wealth grow by more than 20 per cent just since the pandemic.”
DWP declined to say if it now accepted the need for an inquiry into the years of deaths linked to its actions; how it could still be guilty of the systemic flaws that contributed to Naz Anderson’s death, three years after a coroner highlighted similar issues following the death of Philippa Day; and whether DWP finally accepted that there were systemic safeguarding flaws within the universal credit system.
A DWP spokesperson said in a statement: “Our thoughts are with Ms Anderson’s family at this distressing time.
“We will review the coroner’s report and respond shortly.”