Disability journalist John Pring has trumped Stephen Timms by highlighting evidence of the DWP’s violence.

Sir Stephen delayed the end of last week’s Commons work and pensions committee evidence session to claim that Mr Pring’s book The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence implied that there was a conspiracy among civil servants to kill benefit claimants and hide evidence of it – but did not show it.

Mr Pring has published an article, drawing most of its information from his book, to demonstrate that Timms is wrong.

I’m going to put some of the strongest points below, but I would urge you to visit the article for the full details. Mr Pring states:

In June 1992, a Dr T P Scott tells fellow DSS civil servant Dr Mansel Aylward, who is leading work to develop a new assessment process for out-of-work disability benefits, of the need for a harsher approach, to “remove the GP from the equation”, and how doing so would remove the need for GPs to have “further arguments with ‘malingerers’”.

In August 1992, a DSS memo reports on a “brainstorming session” among civil servants, led by Aylward, which includes the suggestion that when a claimant fails to attend an assessment without “good cause”, their benefits should be stopped “immediately”, while GPs who allow too many incapacity claims should be identified and even face “sanctions”.

When the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux publishes a detailed, evidenced report in March 1997 that suggests many disabled people in poor health “are being caused anxiety, distress and pain” by the new assessment – the forerunner of the work capability assessment – a senior civil servant dismisses the report and tells ministers it is “largely based on anecdotal evidence” and that the issues are “sporadic/isolated”.

In November 2001, a “malingering and illness deception” conference is held at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, with the organisers later praising the “enthusiastic support” of Mansel Aylward and “funding from the Department for Work and Pensions”.

A book based on presentations made at the conference includes 43 mentions of the word “malinger”, 1,707 of “malingering”, 80 of “malingerer”, and 121 of “malingerers”.

In October 2005, DWP publishes The Scientific and Conceptual Basis of Incapacity Benefits, co-authored by Aylward, which pushes the line that it is not their impairments or the barriers that disabled people face in society that prevent them working, but their own faults, flaws, and unwillingness to work.

The book provides, one researcher will say later, the “intellectual framework” for the government’s welfare reform bill, which is published the following year and introduces the work capability assessment (WCA).

Research by public health experts from the universities of Liverpool and Oxford, will later show that, across England, the reassessment through the WCA of disabled people receiving the old incapacity benefit was associated with an extra 590 suicides between 2010 and 2013.

DWP documents show how, in 2014, senior civil servants destroy vital documents about the case of Michael O’Sullivan – in breach of the department’s own rules – months after a coroner links his suicide with the WCA.

That decision means DWP is not able to carry out an in-depth investigation – known at the time as a peer review – into the department’s role in his death.

The minister for disabled people in 2014, Mike Penning, later tells DNS that he knew nothing about the decision to destroy the records, and that these decisions were made by DWP civil servants.

Between 2012 and 2014, DWP hides secret peer reviews of deaths linked to the WCA from Professor Malcolm Harrington and Dr Paul Litchfield, the independent experts who between them carry out five reviews of the WCA.

DWP civil servants also fail to show Harrington a coroner’s prevention of future deaths (PFD) report that linked the WCA with the suicide of Stephen Carré in January 2010, and later fail to show Litchfield that report, as well as the PFD that followed Michael O’Sullivan’s inquest.

In 2019, DWP tells the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit that safeguarding concerns about “vulnerable” claimants of universal credit are only being raised by “stakeholders” and that “the evidence for problems was weak and driven from a campaigning perspective, not an evidence based one”.

In the next two years, the deaths of at least three disabled claimants of universal credit are linked to safeguarding flaws within universal credit.

Most recently, DWP’s chief medical adviser, Dr Gail Allsopp – the latest successor to Dr Mansel Aylward – has dismissed the importance of hundreds of secret DWP internal reviews into the deaths of claimants.

Even though these reviews have led to countless recommendations for local and national improvements within DWP since 2012, she tells MPs on the work and pensions select committee that she views the five deaths in the previous 16 months that have led to a coroner sending the department a PFD report as the only ones “that are associated from a DWP perspective”.

Some of you may recall that Vox Political spent years campaigning for the correct number of deaths associated with denial of incapacity benefits/Employment and Support Allowance to be published by the DWP. When I eventually forced the DWP to publish its figures, it included only deaths that occurred within two weeks of a decision to refuse a benefit claim – because that was the only information the department kept.

Even then, it showed that 2,400 people had died after being denied benefit – and the reasons for their deaths were not explained. Who knows how many more passed away over a longer period? By now, the number could be astronomical although, admittedly, campaigning by This Site and others is likely to have reduced the number of people who have been seriously affected by DWP violence against them.

So it seems clear to me that the harm caused to benefit claimants with long-term illnesses and disabilities – including thousands of deaths – were not only hidden by DWP civil servants, but were actually deliberately caused by them, because they suggested the means by which those deaths could be facilitated.

Why else would they make any effort at all to hide the evidence of the way the deceased were treated?

I look forward to hearing Sir Stephen’s response to the wealth of evidence Mr Pring has provided.

If he still isn’t convinced, perhaps he would be kind enough to arrange for a court to examine what has happened in what I understand is defined as a judicial review? Or are his convictions not strong enough for that?

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