The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is once again under fire after revelations that it is withholding a damning report into its own safeguarding failures that led to the deaths of claimants.
The DWP: burying damning reports yet again
The report was intended to provide constructive scrutiny of the DWP’s treatment of disabled benefit claimants. Yet it has never been published and only came to light following persistent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests by John Pring at Disability News Service (DNS).
This latest scandal reveals a disturbing pattern of secrecy and hostility towards accountability. This is completely at odds with Labour’s promises of transparency and fairness.
The report, commissioned in early 2021 and delivered later that year is believed to contain serious criticisms of how the DWP handles disability benefits and the safeguarding of chronically ill and disabled people. As Pring wrote:
It is likely to discuss the links between the department’s actions, policies and practices and the deaths and other harm caused to countless disabled benefit claimants.
Pressure
Yet DWP ministers and civil servants buried it, refusing repeated FOI requests by DNS. They only conceded that the report existed. As Pring wrote:
The existence of the “critical friend” paper only emerged when DNS obtained a memo that proved it was former Conservative work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey who banned her department from using the term “safeguarding” in February 2021.
That memo was titled “Readout of meeting with the SoS department’s response to Baroness Neville Rolfe’s critical friend paper”.
Among those who attended the meeting were senior civil servants with responsibility for service excellence, customer experience and safeguarding strategy.
Even then, they withheld its contents, citing vague justifications about “ongoing policy development.”
Intentional attempts to prevent scrutiny
This is not a mere bureaucratic oversight. It is a calculated attempt to prevent public scrutiny of policies. These are ones that have repeatedly been linked to harm, distress, and even deaths.
Campaigners and bereaved families have for years demanded answers about the deaths of disabled people following DWP decisions, only to be met with deflection, delay, and denial.
The withholding of the report further cements the DWP’s reputation for opacity and institutional indifference.
Now, with Labour back in power, hopes of a more compassionate approach are rapidly fading.
Instead of dismantling the punitive architecture constructed under successive Tory regimes, Labour appears intent on deepening it. New DWP boss Liz Kendall has already signalled plans to tighten eligibility criteria for sickness and disability benefits and ramp up surveillance of claimants.
Shadowed by rhetoric about “supporting people into work,” these proposals echo the same coercive logic that has defined DWP policy for over a decade: the assumption that most disabled people are skiving and must be forced into productivity, regardless of the personal cost.
The DWP has blood on its hands
The failure to publish the report speaks to the political continuity between Tory and Labour cruelty at the DWP.
For a party that claims to be ushering in a new era of integrity, this should be a moment of reckoning. Instead, Labour is embedding very culture of secrecy and suspicion it once opposed. If transparency is more than a slogan, the report must be published immediately. The public must be given the full truth about how state policy is harming its most vulnerable citizens.
Until then, the DWP remains not a safety net, but a trap—shrouded in silence, wielded with cruelty, and backed now by a party that promised better.
Featured image via the Canary
