Tribunal allows DWP to continue to hide information from secret reviews into universal credit deaths

A tribunal has allowed ministers to continue to hide vital information from scores of secret reports into deaths of universal credit claimants, just as they publish a new bill that will have a major impact on the working-age benefits system.

The new universal credit and personal independence payment bill, published yesterday (Wednesday), will cause fresh safeguarding concerns for hundreds of thousands of disabled people who pass through the universal credit system.

But the decision of the information rights tribunal means MPs debating the bill will be prevented from seeing recommendations made by 63 secret reviews into deaths linked to universal credit between January 2020 and November 2023.

Disability News Service (DNS) has been trying for more than 18 months to secure information from DWP that would show what recommendations for improvements were made by civil servants who carried out these internal process reviews (IPRs), dating back to the early months of the pandemic.

These could have been critically-important, both for disabled campaigners and MPs, as the new bill will impose sweeping cuts to universal credit, with further reforms and cuts to come in future months (see separate story).

The information commissioner decided in July 2024 that DWP should release the information to DNS, after the department initially refused to do so, following a freedom of information request.

But DWP appealed that decision to the information rights tribunal.

And despite the same tribunal ruling in April 2016 that similar information must be released by the department, it has now supported DWP’s appeal and its claim that it did not need to release the information to DNS because it “was intended for future publication”.

The three-person panel reached this conclusion even though it is now five years since the first of the IPRs was completed, and more than 18 months since DNS requested the information.

There is still no sign of the information being released, and in nearly a decade since it was first forced to release recommendations made by its secret reviews – then called peer reviews – it is believed that DWP has never published the kind of detail requested without it being demanded through a freedom of information request.

It is highly unlikely that DWP will release such potentially damaging information in the next few months, as the Labour government will be trying to push controversial and unpopular cuts to the disability element of universal credit through parliament in its new bill.

Wendy Stubbs, who leads DWP’s advanced customer support transformation team, told the tribunal in a written statement that IPRs “provide an internal review of a customer’s interactions with the department and whether the correct processes were followed”.

The information commissioner previously argued that it did not consider it “reasonable to delay the release of the IPR recommendations” to DNS.

But Stubbs claimed in her witness statement in January 2025 that DWP would publish the information bit by bit, beginning in the last quarter of 2024-25.

No such information has yet been published.

She claimed that DWP would publish the IPR information from 2022-23 by 31 March 2025, the information for 2020-21 and 2021-22 by 30 November 2025, and the information from 2023-24 by 31 March 2026.

This will mean the full information requested by DNS in November 2023 – if DWP does publish it – will not be published for more than two years after it was requested, with some of the information from 2020-21 not published until more than five years after those IPRs were completed.

The information commissioner supported DNS in the case because it concluded that DWP would not publish all the information requested.

DNS continues to share that view.

The tribunal appeared to believe – wrongly – that the information to be published by DWP would identify the deceased claimants, as it argues in its ruling that “releasing the information after a period of time would be fairer on and cause less distress to the families of the deceased than immediate disclosure upon request”.

DWP has argued for years that it would be unlawful for it to publish any information from IPRs that identifies deceased claimants.

DWP declined to comment this week on why ministers believed it was right to continue to hide such crucial information as parliament is about to start debating a new bill that will include significant cuts and reforms to universal credit.

But it claimed it would publish the recommendations in due course in a managed way which accounts for the sensitive and personal information that IPRs can contain.

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