Why is LABOUR hiding the number of benefit-related deaths?
Why is Labour hiding the number of benefit-related deaths that happened under the last Tory government?
Is it because – after more than a decade of promising to clean up the Department for Work and Pensions that has been responsible for the conditionality and sanctions that appear (it’s the best we can say for now) to have caused thousands of deaths – the new government actually intends to continue the Tories’ blood-drenched work?
The DWP has been a metaphorical charnel house for at least that long, with the period in which it was run by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith being one of particular infamy.
It was during that time that This Writer spent two years forcing the DWP to reveal the number of people who had died after being denied benefits. In the end (August 2015) I was only able to drag limited statistics into the light, showing that 2,400 people had died within two weeks of having been found fit for work.
This indicated that the decision to cut these people off of their benefits was wrong, of course: thousands of people don’t give up the ghost for no reason and if they’ve already said they’re not well, it seems logical that their death has been caused by the illness that the civil servants have denied – or by complications arising from the rejection of their benefit claim.
And what action did the DWP take to prevent such deaths happening again? None – or at least that is what the evidence suggests.
It seems the DWP has been hiding the results of internal process reviews (IPRs) – investigations that were launched after the deaths of Universal Credit claimants – including recommendations intended to prevent further deaths.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ordered the DWP to release the information in July, but in August – under the new Labour government – the DWP appealed against the decision in order to block publication of the facts. Why?
Meanwhile, the punitive regime of benefit sanctions remains in place – and seems set to worsen under Labour. According to Skwawkbox,
Data on the impact of the punitive benefit ‘sanction’ regime on poor claimants was blocked by then-DWP Secretary Therese Coffey. The Tories had commissioned the research themselves into whether benefit sanctions did any good – then hid the results of their investigation and applied more sanctions anyway, more than half a million every year.
Why would a government commission reports on how hard their policies are harming benefit claimants, hide the results, and then increase the pressure on those claimants? There is only one reason This Writer can find, that makes sense:
The results showed that not enough benefit claimants were dying and the government wanted to speed up the process.
And now we have a Labour government instead of a Tory government, that still wants to speed up the number of benefit deaths (it seems) – under a shroud of silence.
2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of my own (limited) success in getting the Tories to admit what they were doing.
Perhaps it is time to ask a few more questions.
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well firstly these ain’t labour but toerags in redties if the truth came people’s wouldn’t believe how many have been culled under the lot of them Hitler’s lot would be happy with them aktion T4 rolling along with out much of a ado