Why does DWP reject so many requests to hold secret benefit deaths reviews? MP asks

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been asked to explain why it is rejecting so many requests from its own civil servants to carry out secret reviews into the deaths of benefit claimants.

DWP’s top civil servant was questioned yesterday* (Wednesday) on figures that showed that 29 requests to carry out an internal process review (IPR) in 2022-23 were rejected by the department’s IPR team.

Most of those 29 requests will have followed the death of a claimant that may have been connected to DWP’s actions, while some will relate to cases where a claimant suffered serious harm.

Any DWP civil servant can refer a case to be considered for an IPR, but Labour’s Debbie Abrahams (pictured) told the Commons work and pensions committee that although 60 requests for an IPR were approved in 2022-23, another 29 were rejected.

Abrahams said the figures suggested that the department might not be “really looking at the full scale and issues of the potential harms that are happening”.

DWP has been collecting such reviews** centrally for more than a decade for the purposes of “continuous improvement” and learning lessons.

But despite more than 10 years of reviews, which DWP refuses to publish in full or even pass to the families of deceased claimants, the recommendations made by the reviews – which do have to be released, following a tribunal ruling in 2016 – repeatedly show how the department’s actions continue to be linked to deaths of disabled people.

In the four years from 2019-20 to 2022-23, DWP’s own figures show that 210 IPRs were either started or accepted following a referral.

Peter Schofield, DWP’s permanent secretary and therefore its most senior civil servant, said there was still a culture of “learning” from those cases where a request for an IPR is rejected, including through the department’s 37 advanced customer support senior leaders (ACSSLs).

According to DWP’s annual report and accounts, ACSSLs are supposed to “coach and engage colleagues across DWP services to help support our most vulnerable customers” and also build and maintain relationships with external organisations that support “vulnerable citizens”.

Schofield claimed there were still “relatively few that make it anywhere near” to an IPR, compared with the “23 million customers that we work with every day, every week, every year”.

But Abrahams said she was concerned that the number of IPRs being carried out was just “the tip of the iceberg”.

She said: “We have no real understanding… of the actual number of claimants who are subject to harm.”

She asked Schofield to write to the committee with further details of the 29 referrals that did not result in an IPR “so we have an understanding of those that didn’t meet the threshold”, and with information that shows “what that threshold is”.

*Watch from 11.16am

**Until April 2015, IPRs were known as peer reviews

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