The Disability News Service (DNS) has obtained a secret DWP paper that shows that the DWP’s failure to make promised call backs and failure to action changes of address can lead to the death of claimants.
DNS obtained a - still partly redacted - version of the document, Errors that can cause serious cases, after a three year Freedom of Information battle.
In one heavily redacted example of DWP failings leading to a claimant’s death, there was delayed action, followed by no call back, followed by a customer written complaint, followed by another no call back and ending with “Family friend calls to report customer’s death…”
The report says that the DWP collects so little evidence about failures to call back that “it is impossible to establish how poor our service might be”.
It adds that the DWP has “become comfortable in not knowing the truth”.
The report details that a service which listens to a sample of DWP calls, found 87 “high-risk calls” concerning disclosures of suicidal ideation and self-harm that were “directly related to failure to action a request for a call back”.
In addition, 15 Internal Process Reviews, usually carried out following the death of a claimant involved failure to call back and another nine involved failure to action a change of address.
You can read the full DNS report here.
