UK

How state violence has devastated the lives of disabled people

The government’s relentless attacks on benefit claimants is still continuing, reports John Pring, whose book The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence is published by Pluto this month.

In August, I spent a week or so visiting 12 campaigners I have grown to respect so much over the last decade. Some of them were disabled people, but all had one thing in common: they had a relative whose death was caused, or at least accelerated, by the actions of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

I travelled across the country, to London, to Milton Keynes, to Nottinghamshire, to Stockton-on-Tees and to the far north-east of Scotland. Everyone I visited has lived through state violence that ripped a hole in their lives.

The evidence I detail in The Department shows how the DWP’s actions caused hundreds, and almost certainly thousands, of deaths of disabled people over the last 15 years. All of them had relied on the state for financial support, for social security. All of them were betrayed by the DWP.

Most of the deaths were linked to the processes the DWP has used to assess the eligibility of disabled people for various benefits, particularly the notorious work capability assessment. My research in the National Archives suggests the origin of these tragedies lies in the late 1980s, and particularly in a memo written by Secretary of State for Social Security John Moore to John Major, then the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It discusses the need to “tackle the rising expenditure” on disability benefits.

From that date onward, it is possible to trace how civil servants, politicians and the private sector began to pick away at the threads of the social security safety net. As I write in my book, that memo set successive governments on a path that would lead to countless deaths through what academics have called “slow bureaucratic violence”.

The violence was certainly slow. None of this happened overnight and in fact it took many years for the worst of the violence to erupt in the austerity years of the early 2010s. But The Department shows exactly how the everyday actions of bureaucrats, ministers and private sector executives combined to cause that terrible violence.

My book details research I’ve carried out over the last decade, but it was built on firm foundations laid by the disabled people’s movement in the early 2010s, particularly those activists who fought to highlight the impact of austerity on disabled people. Using freedom of information requests, I squeezed bits of truth from a resistant and dishonest DWP, and in more recent years uncovered the evidence in the National Archives that showed the origins of this violence.

Woven between the results of this research are the awful stories of some of the disabled people who lost their lives. Among them were Errol Graham, who had recently been sectioned and starved to death after his benefits were stopped because he failed to turn up to an assessment; Michael O’Sullivan, whose suicide was triggered – according to a coroner – by being wrongly found fit for work; and James Oliver, who was terminally ill and living in squalor but still didn’t qualify for personal independence payment because of the lies written about him in his assessment report.

These tragedies showed how this violence has devastated the lives of disabled people across boundaries of race, sex and class. But The Department also shows how the DWP has attempted to cover up and justify its actions, and how it ignored and resisted appeals from disabled people and their allies to make its systems safe.

The stories of those who died are not only heart-breaking and shocking: they are also crucially important, because the new Labour government is about to embark on its own series of reforms of the social security system – of the work capability assessment (which killed Stephen Carré, Jodey Whiting, Mark Wood, David Barr and Roy Curtis), of the sanctions system (which killed David Clapson) and of personal independence payment (which killed Philippa Day).

My visits last month, delivering copies of my book to the families, showed none of them had recovered from the trauma caused by the DWP.

Anne-Marie O’Sullivan, who has fought with such tenacity for more than a decade to expose the truth about her father, Michael, told me that the “toxicity” within the department remains. “I would clear them all out and start again,” he said. “I feel embarrassed for them, that they can inflict so much cruelty and suffering on vulnerable people and their families who are left behind.”

When I asked Anne-Marie if anything surprised her about what she had learned about the DWP, she said: “I was probably shocked by their dishonesty, by their lack of compassion, their lack of professionalism. They knew people were dying but they didn’t value a claimant’s life. They also placed no value on the claimant’s family, because the person who died was a benefit claimant.”

Mo Ahmed, whose sister Faiza took her own life in 2014, hours after a toxic jobcentre interaction with a DWP work coach, says he will never be the same person he was before her death. “I don’t think I will ever be the same Mo, because my sister was taken away from me and she shouldn’t have been. I have a little boy who is four who will never see his auntie. I have as much closure as I will ever get. I don’t think I will ever get over that.”

But The Department does not argue that this is a scandal of the past.

I am now hearing of the same pressures being caused by the rollout of universal credit that I heard all those years ago when the DWP was rolling out the work capability assessment in the early 2010s. There is the same complacency, the same secrecy, the same dishonesty within the DWP. Only last month, I reported how three deaths of disabled people who took their own lives were linked to flaws within universal credit, despite the DWP previously dismissing fears about the safety of ‘vulnerable’ claimants as ‘misplaced’.

It is not too late to address these concerns, to make universal credit and other parts of the social security system safe, but I fear no-one – including Labour’s new Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall – is listening.

The Department is published by Pluto Press. For more information about the book, visit: https://www.thedepartmentbook.com/ John Pring is editor of the Disability News Service Website: www.disabilitynewsservice.com. Twitter: @johnpringdns