GMLC campaign volunteer Ella O’Sullivan reviews journalist John Pring’s new book The Department: How A Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence (2024).
Content Warning: mentions of mental and physical health issues and suicide.
Journalist John Pring has spent a decade investigating the government neglect that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of disabled people. In his new book, he exposes the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and its handing of disability benefits in the UK.
Pring immediately engages readers with deeply moving anecdotes that vividly humanise the people described in his book. He begins the book by centring the suicide of Philippa Day, a young mother who struggled with several mental health issues and physical disabilities. Pring includes a copy of her suicide note, which expressly states how benefit cuts left her feeling like she had no other option than to take her own life. In her own words, the significant reduction in government support put her ‘in a hole that [she] could never get out of’. Pring explains that Ms Day had been given a lifetime award of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) in 1994 because of her diabetes. She should have been able to claim this on top of her Income Support. In 2018, she was advised to apply for Personal Independence Payments (PIP), so she called the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and immediately posted the form on their advice. Ms Day soon discovered that her both her DLA and her PIP claim had been closed, and her Income Support significantly reduced. In that moment, she went from being a person able to look after her son and attend therapy to someone in a position so dark and desperate that she felt she had to end her life. Ms Day was forced to survive on £60 a week. An inquest later found that the DWP’s errors and delays had contributed significantly to her death.
Pring goes on to piece together the series of institutional errors that led to the death of Ms Day, and of hundreds of others. Pring establishes exactly what the department should have done and where they fell short. Throughout, he asks the underlying question, why do the DWP make it so difficult for someone who is trying to get help? Pring argues that the system is deliberately problematic, making it difficult for people to claim benefits in an attempt to significantly reduce the number of people who are claiming. This economically motivated plight aims to reduce government spending and frames it as an attempt to positively reform the benefits system. The government leaves disadvantaged people in their most desperate moments helpless and without options, and Pring argues that the DWP should have foreseen the impending deaths. However, all the spending cuts and institutional changes were justified by a façade of misinformation.
According to Pring, the government has framed welfare benefits reforms as an attempt to combat fraud to ensure that only those who were most in need can receive support. The media perpetuates this narrative, and assists in exaggerating the fraud that is supposedly happening, villainising benefits claimants as exaggerating liars and insisting on the need for reform. News channels report on ’benefits cheats’, which helps push through reforms that make the system worse for everyone who needs it.
Pring undermines the common false narrative with shocking statistics that reveal the reality behind the media distortion. Pring demonstrates how exactly these reforms have been affecting people. He explains that in the first year of the new reformed incapacity benefit in the late 1990s, the amount of people who could claim was expected to significantly drop. The number of claimants were expected to fall by 30,000, while spending was projected to drop by £600 million in 1996-97 and by a further £500 million in 1997-98. These significant cuts were projected despite the DSS ministers being aware that of the 27,719 former recipients who no longer met the threshold, only 289 had been able to actually find work. They were made aware of this information in 1996, a statistic which shows how thousands of people found fit to work were actually unable to sustain themselves without their incapacity benefit. The consequences were deadly.
The Work Capability Assessment (WCA) was the new process used by the UK government to determine whether a person could claim disability or other health related benefits. The system included a long and complicated questionnaire, a face-to-face assessment and used a simple scoring system. Public health experts from the University of Liverpool and Oxford show that for every 10,000 incapacity benefit claimants who were reassessed through the WCA in England between 2010 and 2013, there were 6 additional suicides, 2,700 cases of self-reported mental health problems and an increase of 7,000 in the number of anti-depressants prescribed. The most significant increases were in the most deprived areas. The reassessment process is reported to have resulted in 590 suicides.
One such experience is that of Jodey Witing, a loved mother and daughter. She suffered with severe mental health issues, and many physical problems and ailments, like a curved spine, pneumonia and a cyst on her brain. Ms Witing was on 23 tablets a day, including two lots of morphine, a tranquiliser, anti-anxiety medication and two anti-depressants. She was found fit to work by the DWP after she missed one appointment. A later investigation concluded that the DWP missed five opportunities to prompt particular consideration of her mental health and consider her case because of it. Ms Whiting’s family strongly believe the DWP pushed her to take her own life. Her mother says the department ‘has blood on their hands’.
Judicial reviews of the DWP have revealed the DWP’s significant failures. This includes a finding of the Upper Tribunal and Court of Appeal from 2013 that the DWP discriminated against people with mental health conditions (MM & DM v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2013] EWCA Civ 1565). [1] Specifically, it was found that the application system had been designed to deal with claimants that could accurately describe the way their disability affected their fitness to work. A number of mental health issues result in having problems with self-awareness and self-reporting, resulting in hundreds of people unable to adhere to the new application process.
In a further case in 2017, the High Court ruled that the amendments made by the DWP to the PIP criteria were ‘blatantly discriminatory’, particularly the changes that limited support for people who experience psychological distress when travelling, who were asked to do in-person interviews and assessments (R. (on the application of RF) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2017] UKSC 73).[2]
Overall, ‘The Department’ is an interesting and informative read which demonstrates how the DWP have caused harm to disabled people through the reforms of the benefit system and outlines how they could do better in future. While the new government continues to double down and increase the pressure on disabled and unwell people, this book helps equip readers to challenge narratives and policies that demonise and harm benefits claimants who are trying to get the support they are entitled to.
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[1] Read a summary of this case at https://publiclawproject.org.uk/uncategorized/2833/
[2] Read GMLC’s blog examining this case at https://www.gmlaw.org.uk/2018/07/16/blantantly-discriminatory/#_ftn1
