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A huge increase in the workload faced by civil servants managing universal credit cases led to significant increases in how many of them took time off after experiencing mental distress and other ill-health, new government figures suggest. The figures, secured through […]
Disabled campaigners and union allies have raised concerns about a new Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policy that could make it harder for claimants to access food parcels. They spoke out after the Guardian reported that jobcentre officials had been […]
The head of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has dismissed evidence from scores of his own employees that his department is experiencing a “staffing crisis” and a “mental ill-health epidemic”. The “devastating” dossier was compiled by the Public and […]
Job coaches with no academic qualifications could be making life-changing – and potentially life-ending – decisions on whether a disabled person must carry out work-related activity, if the government goes ahead with its plans to scrap the “fitness for work” test. […]
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has admitted repeatedly breaching the Equality Act, after a disabled man was left needing hospital treatment three times for suicidal thoughts caused by months of failures by universal credit advisers and jobcentres. A legal […]
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) staff and managers deliberately inflicted psychological harm on benefit claimants, engaged in unofficial sanctioning targets, and pushed disabled people into work despite the risk to their health, shocking new testimony has revealed. The evidence comes […]
A new book by a campaigning journalist has exposed how disabled people and others were harassed, neglected and abused by the state bodies they were forced to rely on to survive during the years of austerity. In Abusing Power*, Kate Belgrave […]
Channel 4 and BBC have attempted to justify plans to broadcast two separate fly-on-the-wall documentary series based in jobcentres, both of which could enable ministers to continue their campaign to undermine critical reporting on their “toxic” universal credit benefit system. Only […]
Disabled people and others with personal experience of claiming benefits are leading a ground-breaking project to devise a new social security system, in which claimants would be treated with dignity, trust and respect. The Commission on Social Security, led by Experts […]
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) destroyed a damaging internal report about its failure to ensure the safety of benefit claimants in jobcentres, preventing it being released under freedom of information laws. The report into safeguarding failures in south London […]