The Department
Podcast Transcript

Chris Browne:

Hello and welcome to episode 74 of Radicals in Conversation, the monthly podcast from Pluto Press, one of the world’s leading independent radical publishers. I’m your host, Chris Browne. It’s great to be back in the studio after a couple of months away. We should, with luck, be back to our usual output of episodes for the rest of the year.

Earlier in August, I had the opportunity to speak with John Pring, author of a new book called The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence. The book is out now and it’s available at 40% off for listeners. Just use the coupon PODCAST at the checkout on plutobooks.com. The ‘department’ of the title refers specifically to the DWP, the Department for Work and Pensions and its predecessor, the Department of Social Security.

In the early 2010s, reports began to emerge of deaths linked to the department. Suicide notes, coroners’ reports and research by disabled activists pointed to failings within the DWP, the government body which is responsible for the disability benefits system. As years passed and austerity tightened its grip, the death toll mounted and an even more disturbing picture emerged. Bureaucracy, politicians and the private sector had combined over 30 years to reckless, deadly effect.

For the last decade, John Pring has meticulously pieced together how the DWP ignored pleas to correct fatal flaws in the Social Security system and covered up its role in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of disabled people. Having spent years researching the heartbreaking stories of 12 individuals who died, he describes in the book how their bereaved families have fought for justice and accountability.

The Department is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in a very long time. Understandably, John provides a content warning at the outset and an index of potentially triggering pages. In this episode, as well, discussion covers triggering subjects such as suicide and other traumatic deaths. So with all of that being said, it’s my honour to introduce John Pring on Radicals in Conversation.

John, I’d like to thank you very much for taking the time to come on the show today and to talk to us about your new book, The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence. I finished reading it, I think, two days ago. I read it over the course of a couple of days. Probably one of the most powerful and distressing books I’ve read in a long time, certainly working at Pluto.

It’s an incredible, incredible work. And I do hope that people listening to this conversation will seek it out and try and find out more. But maybe you could start by just telling us a little bit about your own professional background and maybe what motivated you to write the book because, you know, all the endorsements – and there are many really great endorsements – they point to the exceptional quality and the persistence of your research. So, yeah, When did this all begin for you?

John Pring:

Interest in disability as a subject happened at my first job. I was working at the Slough and Windsor Observer. My first job after coming out at Journalism College, 1994. And it was a huge scandal that we helped expose: abuse at a residential home for adults with learning difficulties. It was an absolutely horrific case, and I kind of latched on to it, my first big story, and we helped get independent inquiry and ended up writing a book about it.

I spent a few years there and went to another paper, an evening newspaper, the Coventry Evening Telegraph, and then freelanced a bit and a job came up at Disability Now magazine, which doesn’t exist anymore. But I think I got that because of my work on the book. I spent a few years there and then got made redundant in 2008, 2009 and there was a real lack at the time of… there was lots of comment, lots of features about disability, about disabled people. But there wasn’t very much in-depth reporting on disability issues. So proper news just getting facts. And so I saw a bit of a gap and started Disability News Service, which is a kind of news agency and built up subscribers over the years. It’s been incredibly supportive and it’s still going 15 years later. I mean, it started in 2009, April 2009, and then, you know, slap bang in the middle of austerity, so not a great time to launch a business. But then the next year we got hit with the coalition and the cuts that Osborne and Cameron were announcing early on in that new government. And it just created waves of concern, real alarm amongst a lot of disabled people. Early on there was big March before the Tory conference that year in Birmingham and that kind of sparked the launch of DPAC, Disabled People Against Cuts, which would have played a huge part later on in this whole thing.

But I remember particularly this protest in Hyde Park about, I don’t know, 80-90 activists from Mad Pride were there just talking about the cuts to support and the impact this is going to have on people’s lives, particularly people with mental distress. And they were distraught. These are people who were seriously unwell and they were just worrying about their benefits and just worrying about being forced into work when they knew they couldn’t work.

And one of the activists, Denise McKenna, who’s just a fantastic activist, she talked about it being like a hand grenade being thrown into people’s lives and obviously made a big impression on me at the time, but obviously not quite big enough impression, because I continued on my way and, you know, did my stories and built up this new service.

I didn’t really get to grips with exactly how serious this was and how serious it was going to be as it developed. I didn’t really know very much about Work Capability Assessment and the assessment processes. It gradually started to build up. Another journalist got there before me, definitely. And the Disabled People’s movement played a huge part in raising awareness about what was happening, did fantastic research, produced reports.

The Spartacus movement, for instance, did some incredible work. And then in about 2013, 2014, it gradually got into my head that there must be some documents in the DWP that will help to explain what’s happening and see exactly how widespread this is. Because people were starting to die. People were starting to take their own lives. People were starting to die because they haven’t got enough money to eat. These horrific deaths we were hearing about. And I was thinking, okay, this can’t be right. But DWP, the Department for Work and Pensions, which is responsible for Social Security, must have records of how many people are dying. Coroners must have records. Actually, they didn’t really, but the DWP must have. And initially they said, No, no, no, we don’t. We don’t think that’s something we should be doing. I remember Mark Harper at the time was Minister for Disabled People, 2014 Conference, I think it was, Tory party conference, saying… just refusing to engage with this issue, just refused to accept that they should be collecting evidence and reports of these deaths linked to benefits. And then I went to the Lib Dem conference the next week and they said, actually we do do that. The Pensions Minister, Steve Webb said yeah, we do actually do that. And then it was just this big struggle to get information from the department and that’s really how it all started. I think that’s kind of how my work really started around about that time and it really snowballed, but snowballed in a very, very slow way. And you have a very, very slow snowball, maybe on a very gentle incline, or decline it would be, wouldn’t it? Yeah.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. I think what you’re already alluding to there, the slowness of this, I mean, there’s an idea that comes through, a key concept in the book, which is like slow violence.

John Pring:

Which is an idea that Dr. China Mills, who I’ve worked on a couple of projects with introduced me to a couple of years back. So important, so important to this story, this idea of slow violence. It explains how and why the violence started in a small way in 1989, 1990, and in those years of, well, it became the John Major government in ‘92 with their reforms; Peter Lilley who was the Social Security secretary at the time. There were deaths that I talk about in the book, I think most people would not have known about yet. Didn’t get any publicity at the time. One was covered in the local paper. And another one later on, in fact, 2000, got a little bit of publicity. But these are deaths that people won’t know about yet, but in small numbers I think.

I don’t think they’ve hidden vast numbers of deaths in the nineties or the 2000s. I think it really did just gradually grow this violence until it really did and I’ve used this word before, ‘exploded,’ under austerity. 2013 was a particularly awful year when it was so many really distressing deaths, really distressing deaths, people not having enough money to eat, people just driven into despair by what they were being asked to do.

Somebody like Michael O’Sullivan, he was just harassed to death. I don’t think it’s any other way of describing it. And others were as well. Yeah.

Chris Browne:

Absolutely. And I suppose those years, the austerity years, 2010 to 2013, I think there was a study – was it the Universities of Oxford in Liverpool? – that kind of essentially the research showed 590, nearly 600 people had committed suicide as a result, or their deaths were linked to assessments by the DWP. So that’s, I suppose, what we’re talking about, the snowballing of this slow violence.

And it kind of really comes to this awful crescendo around then. But maybe if we just row back a little bit: in chapter one in the book, you start by asking sort of rhetorically where the story should begin. You know, how far back in history do you wade to provide the useful social context to understand what we’re discussing?

And ultimately, you’ve kind of already alluded to it, but you land on this memo that was sent in, I think it was 1989 by the secretary of State of Social Security, John Moore, to John Major, who was then chief secretary to the Treasury. So what was the crux of this memo? You know, what was the context in which it was written? And then what question, I suppose, did it pose that was to have such disastrous ramifications, you know, far reaching consequences, all these years later?

John Pring:

Yeah, I kind of describe it as year zero because it was saying we need to look at disability benefits. John Moore sends this memo to John Major. “I think it would be sensible to discuss the general approach to disability benefits,” the need to “temper the rising expenditure on these benefits.” Yeah, he talks about we need to “put forward a package offering long term savings.” “For me the key issue is not whether we adopt a package such as proposed in the tax paper, but when.” And that just sets the scene. They’re going to attack disability benefits. They think they’re too high. We later find out through other memos that actually the numbers, if they have gone up, they’re not because you know, the benefits are too easy to claim or anything like that.

There are very good rational reasons for the number of people claiming disability benefits going up. One of them is that people are living longer, disabled people are living longer because of improvements in health, you know, another one is more women being employed, so more disabled women being employed and all these kind of factors that come into it that they ignore and they say that it’s too many people claiming disability benefits, we’re going to have to cut it.

And then they talk about – these documents in the archives, show how they talk about – a way that they can do this, that they bring in this new assessment process that will cut spending, cut the caseload by significant chunks I think they talk about 20%. 20% always seems to be the number that they go for when they talk about cuts to disability benefits.

I think George Osborne talked about 20% cuts in 2010 as well. It just seems to be this kind of magic number they just pluck out. Big enough to sound really impressive, but they’re not so big that people will be rioting, you know, so let’s beware: if the Labour government talks about 20% cuts of spending to disability benefits, we’ll know where that’s come from.

That’s kind of how it started. And then you get this Gallup survey in January 1990 – we can’t prove that the DSS briefed the media to scapegoat claimants, but that’s definitely how it looked. So they, the National Audit Office publishes its report on what was then called invalidity benefit, and it talks about how it’s risen, how it’s expected to rise further.

And a Gallup survey talks about GP’s not refusing sick notes, allowing too many sick notes, approving too many sick notes. There’s nothing in there to suggest fraud, widespread fraud at all. At all. But all the headlines, you’ve got the Sun talking about “lead swinging.” You’ve got the Daily Mail talking about the “scandal of sick notes,” “GPs’ charter for work shy” in the Daily Express and even the supposedly Liberal media talking about saving on sickness benefits urge the independent and the Guardian talking about “fit jobless” getting sick benefit, and this pattern will be repeated in later years.

Again, can’t prove the DSS has breached these papers to say this, but wasn’t in the survey and it wasn’t in the National Audit Office report. So maybe it’s just a miracle all these papers said exactly the same thing, or something very, very similar. And that will happen again in the 2000s under the Labour government, when they wanted to cut benefits, and that will definitely happen in the early 2010s when the Tories wanted to cut disability benefits.

They enlist the media to push this line of scroungers and fakers and frauds without any evidence.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I think this is something that comes through in the book, this kind of narrative around malingering, illness, deception – how you go from a position in the early nineties where, you know, surveys would suggest that the general public doesn’t really think that, you know, there’s overly generous Social Security safety net in place to a position twenty you know, thirty years later where absolutely everyone thinks there’s far too many people claiming, that they’re all fraudulent…

I think there’s, you know, you cite a focus group in 2011 where something like 70% of… no, people believed that 70% of all claims were fraudulent and the reality is that although there is obviously some benefit fraud it’s statistically irrelevant.

John Pring:

Yeah, it’s about, you know, usually about 1- 2%. In fact, some DWP figures I think from earlier this year had said level of PIP fraud, Personal Independence Payment fraud: 0%. So you know, 70%. I mean what… totally ridiculous. But that’s what got into people’s heads because of how the government department, the DWP or the DSS before it, worked with media you know to feed them that stuff and say, no, this all these cheats and frauds, we’ve got to clamp down on this.

That’s why we’re going to cut spending, because there’s so much widespread fraud around. And you talk about malingering, that word is really important. And yes, it’s November 2001, and this was a conference sponsored by the DWP, at which the DWP chief medical adviser delivered a paper. It was about malingering and a book based on the conference was called Malingering and Illness Deception. And paper after paper delivered at that conference that talked about this so-called malingering epidemic. You know, it’s so, it’s so widespread. There’s no evidence for that at all. There’s no evidence in there. It just said, oh, the reason we haven’t got data on all this, because it hasn’t been done yet or it’s too difficult. So it was all supposition and guesswork and discrimination, basically, by a series of academics who delivered this conference.

And I had a look at the book and fortunately got hold of it in a PDF copy. The book, which was based on the presentations at the conference, included 43 mentions of the word ‘malinger,’ 1707 of ‘malingering,’ 80 of ‘malingerer,’ and 121 of ‘malingerers’. It’s really horrific when you read it. The kind of misinformation and they all seem pretty, pretty convinced what they’re saying.

This is the kind of attitude and belief that’s right at the core of the Department for Work and Pensions at that time, and in my opinion, still is. And it’s never left. Right from the DSS all the way through these years. It’s this belief that there’s widespread fraud and people are just defrauding the system, which is just based on nothing whatsoever apart from their discriminatory beliefs basically.

Chris Browne:

Mm hmm. Yeah. I was going to ask, you know, whether it was a case of – and, you know, maybe posing it as an ‘either or’ is not that helpful – but, you know, the dehumanizing and derogatory language, this kind of obsession with, you know, benefit fraud, you could say, well, is this kind of rhetoric just being deployed cynically as a strategy to, you know, soften up public attitudes so that when they implement these radical changes to assessments and so on, it means that they’re not going to be met with any major resistance by the public, you know, or is it this genuine belief that benefit claimants are all fraudulent, essentially? But maybe, you know, these two things can coexist at once?

John Pring:

Yeah, I think they probably do.

Chris Browne:

I mean, it’s interesting. You note how the DSS, you know, as it was, is replaced by the Department for Work and Pensions in 2001 I think. I mean, I was going to ask, you know, what changes at that point, if anything, in terms of the culture, the structure, the interests of the department? Is there any real change?

John Pring:

From the DSS to the DWP? No, there isn’t. I mean, and that’s the thing. You go from the Conservative government of the early nineties to the New Labour government of ‘97 and then back to the Conservative led coalition in 2010 and successive governments. Nothing seems to change in policy. It’s all that kind of build up of slow violence.

So you can see a kind of steady road, there’s a straight road going through it. There’s no changes in policy or culture. All right. There was some elements of the New Labour government that were much more intent on addressing discrimination against disabled people. It was the office, I think it was the Office for Disability Issues. You know, a couple of ministers were clearly intent on supporting disabled people, Anne McGuire was pretty good.

But when it comes to the benefit reforms, you don’t really see any difference at all. And Tom O’Grady’s research and book on on this, he talked about Labour’s change of tone on Social Security from the early nineties and then from the mid-nineties it kind of changed. And he’s saying that this was one of the unexpected steps that New Labour took on policy to show that they changed. We’re not old Labour anymore; this is New labour, and disability benefits and welfare reform was one of those things that they kind of latched on to to show that they changed. This wasn’t the old Labour Party anymore. This is Tony Blair’s New Labour Party. And this very interesting and I don’t think these have been… I don’t think this paper has been publicised before, minutes from Cabinet meeting that are in the National Archives at which they talk about this in late 1997. There was a lot of publicity around this at the time about the proposed cuts to disability benefits. And it’s fascinating. It shows that Tony Blair was like, we can’t listen to all the naysayers. You know, we have to push through this. We know we’re right. We’ve got to cut spending on this. It’s just there’s too much spending on disability benefits. He makes it very clear that there will be no backing down on this. This is something that he sees as a kind of mission. You know, when you look at the stats later on, they show that the numbers of claimants wasn’t rising out of all control. I don’t think it was rising at all in this period.

Chris Browne:

Hmm. Yeah, I think what you’re saying there about like the continuity between the successive governments, Tory and then New Labour and then back to the Coalition government is, is really apposite. And like you talked about that 20% figure earlier as being the recurring, you know, magic number – I think you refer in the book to actually like Peter Hain describing the aim for half of new claimants during the Work Capability Assessment process to be found fit for work.

I mean, this just seems firstly an astronomically high figure, but it also seems to speak to the fact that, you know, the Government’s starting off from a sort of a budgetary concern position and then working backwards from there rather than starting from an honest sort of assessment of what people’s actual needs are.

John Pring:

Exactly right. There was no hint of any research I found, definitely through the nineties and obviously this is like the 20 year rule with the National Archives, so I was really only able to get papers up to 2002 whatever. So, but anyway, in that period I looked at, there was no hint of any research in that department on how many people we really think need support and how many people should be getting it.

It was all about, well, this is clearly too high. How much can we get away with cutting? And then how can we justify it? We justify it by feeding lies to the media. James Purnell said some particularly vile things to the Liverpool Echo at one point, I think so, yeah. It’s not evidence based. Other people have talked about this. It’s policy-based evidence rather than evidence-based policy. And that’s what seems to come out of the DWP and still does. Yeah, and we’re all on tenterhooks now as to what’s going to happen because Labour’s clearly going to act on Personal Independence Payment, sanctions, Work Capability Assessment, out of work benefits, universal credit. And so myself, particularly a lot of disabled activists are very, very intent, like we talk about this later on, making sure that MPs are aware of the history of what will happen if they try this again.

Chris Browne:

We’ve been talking about the high policy level and obviously over time, you know, you have new bits of legislation, you have new assessment procedures, you know, even the department name changes. There’s a lot of different acronyms and so on. So it’s kind of hard to keep abreast of that within the scope of our conversation. But there’s a lot of continuity.

That’s something we’ve already suggested. So, you know, let’s talk about, you know, the ‘All Work Test’ and then, you know, what became, I guess, the Work Capability Assessment, you know, which is pretty infamous. I think anyone that remembers the austerity years knows what the Work Capability Assessment was. You know, it’s described in the book by Professor Geoff Shepherd as being reckless. And then he sort of corrects himself and says, no, actually it was ruthless. He was a clinical psychologist involved initially in one of the DWP’s working groups.

John Pring:

Yeah. So he was one of their advisers, he was one of their advisers and he and others were saying, don’t do this. It’s going to cause, it’s going to cause mayhem.

Chris Browne:

Let’s talk about some of the actual… what was involved in these procedures, the Work Capability Assessment and its predecessors, I guess, you know, what was it designed to do? What did the people who are sort of forced to undergo that process… Yeah – give us a bit more detail about just kind of why it was so horrific.

John Pring:

I mean, there were so many levels to it, but a lot of it was about the pressure that was put on people. So the Work Capability Assessment, not everybody had to go to this face to face assessment, but it was often the face to face assessment that caused a lot of harm. And there were aspects of that harm – one of the aspects was that a lot of the assessors… so the assessors were all at that point in the early years of the harm, were then carried out by Atos, which is one of the big outsourcing companies, became absolutely notorious because of its association with the Work Capability Assessment, and then later with the Personal Independence Payment assessment, which is slightly different. So their assessors were often poorly trained and there was a lot of suspicion that they had targets, that they were put under a lot of pressure to find people fit for work. And I don’t think that’s under any dispute at all, there was lots of pressure to find people fit for work, even though they weren’t and they carried out as many assessments as they could and the more assessments they carried out, the more money they got.

And another reason why it was really violent was because particularly for people with mental distress, there wasn’t enough emphasis on getting evidence from the people that knew them best, i.e. the doctors, the consultants, the psychiatrists, the community psychiatric nurses that actually had years of experience of what levels of distress these people were living with. And some of the people in the book, you know, went to these assessments and their benefits were decided on the basis of a 20, 30, 40 minute interview with someone who was really looking at them as a scrounger anyway and just found them fit for work.

Stephen Carré’s case is one of the early ones, and it actually led to a coroner writing a letter to the DWP saying, stop doing it like this because other people will die. And they made a tiny tweak in their procedures. But people did continue to die. Yeah. So that process of going through that assessment often by, you know, people being put under a massive amount of pressure to find them fit for work… the assessment they first brought in in 1995, you have to do some credit to Mansel Aylward who I write about a lot in the book, who introduced that test, the All Work Test. Only doctors can carry that out, medically trained professionals were the only ones that could really work out whether somebody was fit for work or not. But by the time the Work Capability Assessment came in in 2008 and then really cranked up in 2010 onwards, it was like nurses, physiotherapists as well as doctors, which was just incredibly dangerous.

So not enough training; not enough knowledge; this massive pressure. All behind this is the public pressure. Look at all these scroungers Look at these benefit frauds, all these cheats. You know why are they leeching off the state and that kind of psychological pressure on people as well. And then if they get one thing wrong, if they missed an assessment, don’t turn up for instance, if they are just too ill to open their mail, not responding to their mail, they very quickly just have their benefits just removed.

And that’s something that happened, for instance, in the later years to Errol Graham, who was really very seriously ill with his mental health and was just pretty much just locked in his flat, you know, just wasn’t able to go to a face to face assessment. He just wasn’t. And they just ended up… his gas was cut off. He had no money left and he literally starved to death in his flat because the DWP cut off his benefits, because he hadn’t turned up for an assessment. That’s the kind of thing they were doing. And it wasn’t just him, and the tragedy of this – I mean, that’s a tragedy on its own, but multiply that tragedy by however many times, is there are so many people like that we will never know about because they they didn’t have people fighting for them at inquests or families that went to the media, which is only a very small proportion, people very rarely go to the media with intensely personal things like this.

It’s this very particular kind of person that goes, someone who’s really, you know, got this powerful impetus for social justice and putting right what’s wrong. Other people are just too upset or just don’t trust the media. So many cases and people that don’t have family or friends, just live very isolated lives – we will never find out what happened to them and they will have died similarly awful…

The horror of his death is just… so I just can’t get my head around that sometimes. And others as well.Faiza Ahmed’s death is just – different, not connected to the Work Capability Assessment, but still the horror of what’s going through their minds at the time. And the fact that that is provoked by the state, I still can’t get my head around it.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is what’s so, so distressing in the book is you convey these stories of these people who faced this awful, awful cruelty and violence. And I think the point you’re making about the fact that, you know, some of these family members obviously go on to really sort of fight for justice, but that must just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of representation of the number of people that suffered.

The fact that the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities investigates the UK government over allegations of systematic and grave violations of disabled people’s human rights is really damning. You know, the UK being the first country to face such a high level inquiry and that many of the bereaved family members of the deceased are involved in providing evidence to this committee.

John Pring:

Yeah.

Chris Browne:

Could you say a little bit about that process? You know, what was the assessment or recommendations, or the findings, I suppose, of this UN committee? And what was the response you know, from the government to it?

John Pring:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’m laughing because the response was just so awful. But what’s interesting and important about that inquiry by the UN committee, the reason it took place was because of action from disabled activists. And, you know, my book would not have happened without that. Everything in this book stems from the work that disabled activists did, the disabled people’s anti-cuts movement, particularly, you know, they basically bombarded the UN committee said, look, this is what’s happening, here’s the evidence, and they provided brilliant evidence.

People like the late Debbie Jolly, an unbelievably fantastic disabled activist, and people at DPAC, and they persuaded the UN committee to carry out this investigation. Most of it was about the DWP’s work. And eventually in late 2016, they found the UK government guilty of grave and systematic violations of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

And the government’s response was just to completely dismiss it in a pretty shameful way. And they’ve never, ever really properly engaged. I mean, they go through the motions and they have to I mean, they couldn’t you know, they couldn’t leave the convention. I mean, that would just create too much of a fuss. So they just dismiss it and dispute it.

They didn’t engage with it. And then earlier this year, there’s the follow-up to that report in Geneva, again, and there is almost no progress. And in some areas it’s actually got worse. And that shows how little respect there has been for the rights of disabled people, particularly on these particular issues and how they’ve just not been anywhere near the centre of the government’s thinking over the last ten years, particularly around Social Security and disabled people.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I think you note in the book how, you know, any suicides linked to the provision of, you know, a mental health service, you know, through the NHS or not even through the NHS would be the subject of a lengthy and probing review, and that the contrast that you see with these deaths caused by the DWP is stark. You know, you’ve already kind of suggested that not much ever changed as a result of the, you know, prevention of future death reports, their own sort of internal reviews.

It seems like nothing changed throughout the course of this, this history. Is that correct?

John Pring:

This is one of the frustrating things, is that some things have changed. I mean, we know they have changed because, for instance, you know, they have announced things, new processes they do, new teams they set up – they set up this serious case panel, which looks at the overall kind of issues around serious cases, deaths… I don’t think any of this would have happened if we hadn’t kicked up this massive fuss for years and years and years. I really don’t think it would have done. But they never… they never say thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ve done this because disabled people have kicked up a row They just quietly do it. And then when there’s another death they say, Oh, yeah, but look, we’ve done this. They have done some small things. They haven’t changed the culture of the department.

The violence is still there. We know it’s still there because people keep dying. I ran a story just yesterday. The Prime Minister’s implementation unit did a report on universal credit and its support for what they call vulnerable claimants, which is, you know, a lot of disabled people come into that group, a lot of people with mental distress, people with learning difficulties, autistic people come into that group.

And this report said what you really need to check on what the minimum level of support is for vulnerable claimants across Jobcentres and you need to test that your staff are aware of these policies and how these policies change. Do these assurance exercises. But then the pandemic came and they got so wrapped up with how fantastic universal credit was during the pandemic and how it saved the world.

And they said, Look, all this nonsense was only driven by stakeholders, which is a kind of dismissive way they talk about some activists. It’s just stakeholders. They’re just scaremongering. Yeah, we don’t need to do this work. And then in that year or two years after that, at least three people I know of took their own lives because of the pressure of universal credit, because universal credit is not safe and because they’re continuing to harass people. I mean, some of the cases, and one of them hasn’t got to inquest yet, I’ve written about it a little bit in the book. Just horrific, the assessment. She was someone who has serious mental distress, barely left the house and had to come in to the Jobcentre. She was allowed one phone call. So the first one, they let her do it by phone. She had a support worker with her and she was told by this work coach that we’re letting you do this one on the phone. But next time you’re going to have to come into the Jobcentre. And then a few days later, she took her own life. She couldn’t cope. That’s the kind of thing that’s still happening. So, yes, they have changed things around the edges, but there’s no transparency. They’re still hiding these secret reports. The culture of the department is still violent. There’s no doubt about that. It just needs reform from top to bottom, probably needs a completely new department. I don’t think they’ll do that. It needs an inquiry, needs to be found not fit for purpose, there needs to be a police investigation into some of the conduct of senior civil servants and ministers over the years. They won’t do that either, but keep asking for it just in case.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. No, absolutely. I think, you know, yeah, it’s kind of implied in the subtitle of the book, you know, ‘How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence.’ You make no bones about the fact that there is a cover up. You know, there’s constantly cover ups. What practices would you point to that indicate, you know, not just incompetence and the usual sort of mistakes made by individuals, but this more willful and systemic sort of negligence, I guess?

John Pring:

Yeah, there’s a lot of examples. Let me point maybe to a couple. So I talked about Stephen Carré’s suicide in January 2010 and the coroner’s report that went to the Department for Work and Pensions. And it was in the inbox of Iain Duncan Smith when he arrives as the new secretary of state in May 2010. And at the time, they were going to roll out the assessment process, the Work Capability Assessment, to people on incapacity benefit.

This had been a big source of toing and froing in the election campaign. Labour and Tories and the Lib Dems, I think… But anyway, definitely Labour and the Tories had trying to out-do themselves as to how quickly they were going to roll this out to people who’ve been on incapacity benefit for years, like people who have serious barriers to work and a lot of people with serious health conditions, mental distress, but they want to do this nice and quickly.

So they’ve got this report from the coroner. They appoint this independent reviewer, as Labour was going to do anyway, to look at the Work Capability Assessment, to see how good it is. They don’t give this coroner’s report linking this suicide with the Work Capability Assessment, they don’t give it to the independent reviewer that they have appointed to review the safety of the Work Capability Assessment.

I think if anything shows the culture of that Department and of the politicians that make that… Iain Duncan Smith we’re talking about you here, we’re talking about you and decisions you made and Chris Grayling in 2010, and that decision undoubtedly led to people losing their lives. And then, for instance, you know, you get another… I’m talking about it now and I still can’t quite believe it, but still, anyway it happened.

And then Michael O’Sullivan’s awful death in 2013. I mentioned him already. And again, the coroner at his inquest wrote another prevention of future deaths report, coming to almost exactly the same conclusions that the coroner in Stephen Carré’s suicide had come to. You need to look at this assessment process. You need to get more evidence from the people that knew the claimant best, the psychiatrist, the community psychiatric nurse, the doctor.

Again, that’s something they hadn’t done with Michael O’Sullivan. He just had this face to face assessment and they found him fit for work, and again, he died. And, you know, this was three and a half years after Stephen Carré had died and about three years after the Prevention of Future Deaths report had been given to the DWP. And then also we haven’t talked yet about these peer reviews, their own secret investigations when people died. We only found out these even existed in, what was it, 2014, 2015. Again, they eventually admitted that lots of these peer reviews linked the Work Capability Assessment with suicides, but they didn’t give them to the independent reviewer. This isn’t the coroner doing it, it’s not like, maybe you could just say it was just the coroner and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But these are their own internal, secret reviews that they carried out into deaths, linking the Work Capability Assessment with suicides and other deaths. And they don’t give it to that independent reviewer. Is that not criminal? I don’t understand why people who’ve taken these decisions are not facing police investigations. I just don’t understand it.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s kind of a good time to share a quote from the book, which is from Dave Smith, brother of James Oliver, whose story is one of those in the book. It summarizes in one paragraph I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about: “This is about a government department who thinks it is right to treat the sick, disabled and dying like they just don’t have a right to exist; about private assessment companies who employ people where they’re essentially paid to lie; about government ministers who haven’t got the faintest idea about what it’s like to be sick, vulnerable, and cast aside like domestic waste.” Yeah, I think it speaks to the, you know, the cruelty and the inhumane practices that kind of flourished within the department. And I think you pose the question in the book, you know, even if you know, incoming ministers to the department, Iain Duncan Smith and others, you know, wanted to pursue an ideological agenda, you know, driven by the logic of cuts, why did, you know, lower ranking civil servants within the DWP act the way they did? You know, what psychological or structural considerations are there that might account for it? Why this culture was allowed to flourish?

John Pring:

I think there was a lot of pressure. We know there was a lot of pressure put on junior civil servants. You know, a certain number of them probably got a bit of a kick out of it, but there was some fantastic research carried out by Dr. Jamie Redman and Professor Del Roy Fletcher at Sheffield Hallam University published in 2021. So only about three years ago. They’d interviewed a number of civil servants who work for DWP and their contractors and they basically describe how DWP staff and managers inflicted this kind of psychological harm on benefit claimants, engaged in these unofficial sanctioning targets and pushed disabled people into work when they weren’t fit to do this.

It was like this top down pressure on the staff. They said it acted as this kind of moral anaesthetic which made invisible the needs and interests of the claimants they were sanctioning. There was this increasing expectation from above to hand out sanctions, and it’s also applied to those, the work program providers. So they’re the kind of outsourced private sector that were providing employment support.

What they wanted to explain was how ordinary people carrying out their daily duties were able to implement cruel and inhumane Social Security reforms. I had an example of this, an autistic man I spoke to, David Scott, who actually recorded some comments made by his his work coach. So she said to him, “So I’m here to support you whether you like it or you don’t.” Right. And he said, “Well, this would be the first time I’ve experienced that from the DWP.” And she said, “Well, I’m not here to stick pins in your eyes, unless you want me to. And it will be a biro, not pins. All right?” And then she says – I’m laughing because you can’t understand how someone like this is working as a work coach – she said, “I’ve taught autistic children for a long time. So yeah, it’ll be a sharp poke.” This is the kind of person who was working for DWP. The combination of that and – I should stress here, this is a minority of people who work for DWP, and I know this from the people I spoke to over the years, there are lots of really, really good people, junior civil servants who work for DWP. I know a lot of people don’t agree with me when I say this, but that’s actually true. There are lots of really good hearted people that work for DWP, but there’s also a minority of people who are not really nice people. But also I think the most important thing is this pressure, the culture that comes down from above and is very similar to that… You know, what happened at the Longcare home, the abuse scandal I talked about earlier; my first book. You know, you have someone really dangerous at the top of an organization and it filters down. They show that this kind of behavior was acceptable and even to be recommended, and it filters down. So those at the lower levels, the care workers, for instance, kind of mirror that abuse and it’s very similar.

Those two kind of models are horrifically similar. I haven’t… I don’t probably make enough of those links, but thinking about it now, it’s definitely very clear in my mind that that happens. It’s a culture in that department. It’s definitely a culture. If there’s a way to change the upper echelons of the DWP, that I think would make the most difference. Yeah.

Chris Browne:

I mean, maybe that answers the question. I was going to ask next, which is, you know, what sets the department apart from the wider harm, you know, that was inflicted by, you know, austerity policies, you know, across society sort of at the time. Maybe it is partly this culture.

John Pring:

Yeah, I mean, I think DWP is probably the worst example. But you look at The Violence of Austerity book. That was fantastic and had examples of this, just this kind of bureaucratic violence across society during austerity. And you see examples of this, don’t you, in other you know these big scandals – Post Office scandal for instance, the blood scandal. Yeah.

Chris Browne:

There’s I think two things we’ve not touched on, one of which we will and maybe one which will leave to one side. You know, we haven’t talked so much about privatization and what the impact of the introduction of the private sector was, particularly the insurance industry. Maybe we’ll just park that; people can find out more in the book.

But one thing which you’ve already alluded to is just how vital the work was of, you know, activists, you know, the groups that kind of appeared around 2010, you know, Black Triangle, Mental Health Resistance Network and Disabled People Against Cuts. And of course, the relatives of some of the deceased who went on to, you know, pursue justice for their relatives.

There’s a lot more we could say about that. You know, and obviously, they’ve been hugely important in the research process as well, providing the evidence and now post-publication of the book, I suppose it’s not technically published yet, coming out on the 20th of August, but there is at the moment this crowdfunding campaign, which I believe some of these kind of activist groups are involved in, to put a copy of The Department (the book) in the hands of every MP in this new Parliament is going to come back into session in September.

Could you say a little bit about the work of some of these activists more broadly in terms of what we’ve been discussing? And then maybe tell us a little bit about this crowdfunding campaign. Why is it important to put this book in the hands of MPs?

John Pring:

Well, I mean, the book wouldn’t have happened without the work of activists. And it all stems from their campaigning and activism from, I mean, they started… most of them started around about 2010. And they’ve been doing this, crikey, they’ve been doing this for 14 years. And I’m just filled with admiration for them, their staying power, because they’re not paid for this. They just do it because they know it’s right. So, yes, you mentioned mental Health Resistance Network, Disabled People Against Cuts play particularly important part, Spartacus in the early years. Black Triangle worked on some of the stories in the book. Black Triangle, some of them were trying to get police to take action against Iain Duncan Smith. Police Scotland; didn’t quite happen in the end, unfortunately, but they tried.

That was really important. First of all, raising awareness of it and keeping it in the news and letting people know and letting other disabled people know what was happening and that it was wrong. And taking the fight to Parliament, sometimes literally inside Parliament, or outside and marching, in direct action protest, all these things, raising awareness of what’s happening.

Even if the media aren’t paying a massive amount of attention, they still do their best and often just force the media to pay attention because of that strength of what they’re doing. So yeah, the book just point blank would not have happened without them. It’s come from the movement. I like to think that anyway, I hope they approve of it because it’s only happened because of their work.

Yeah. With the crowdfunding it was, it was an idea of John McArdle from Black Triangle, who again, I first met back in 2011, 2012, and he did a lot of really important work raising awareness of some of the harms that the Work Capability Assessment and the regulations were causing. Did really important work about raising awareness among GP, about some of the things they could do to make it more safe. Saved lives, undoubtedly saved lives.

So he had this idea that, look, we know the new Labour government is going to implement reforms. There are fears that they’re just going to carry on with the reforms, dangerous reforms that the Conservative government has already said that we’re going to do, and it’s kind of already being implemented kind of. So we need to get the book to Labour MP because they’re the important ones, because there’s so many of them; nothing will happen if all the Labour MPs vote in line for the Government.

So he started crowdfunding with Ellen Clifford, another disabled activist who’s played just an incredibly important role, particularly with the United Nations work. She she kind of coordinates a lot of that work, bringing activists’ stories and evidence together to give to the UN. They both went to Geneva earlier this year to try and hold the government to account with lots of other disabled activists.

And it kind of came out of, my understanding is, it came out of a WhatsApp group they set up, they talked about, you know, what can we do? And John McArdle mentioned this idea and they said, Yeah, that’s a great idea. So yeah, they set it up and it went so well that they got enough money to give it to every MP, and hopefully that will go to them on 2nd September, when they come back from the holidays. We can’t force them to read it. And I’m sure some of them won’t, you know, I know MPs are really, really busy. They’re even busier than I am and I am really busy. But I hope if they haven’t got time to read it, they will maybe just give it to a member of their staff, maybe their chief of staff or a press officer, maybe even an intern and just say, Look, just read this, give me a couple of paragraphs. What do I need to know? That would be something. I hope they won’t just throw it away because they need to know what DWP’s done in the past and what it could still do in the future if they aren’t aware of the culture and of the kind of messages that DWP is now giving to ministers. We’ll keep our fingers crossed about the new ministers.

Stephen Timms has done some really good work. He’s the new Social Security Disability Minister. He’s done some really good work in opposition, Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, holding Government to account. So fingers crossed. He was a minister in the DWP in the 2000s for three years. I don’t think he was right in the heart of all this. But you know, that does worry me a little bit. But, you know, I’m hopeful that he will, he will listen and backbench MPs, I think if there’s a groundswell. We know there is going to be a small pocket of brilliant MPs like John McDonnell has just done amazing, amazing work over the years backing DPAC and other disabled activists.

He’s just been brilliant with that and I don’t know what would have happened. He’s sponsored meetings and been on marches. I mean I remember going to a protest like years ago outside Westminster Abbey on a Saturday, and he was there just showing support. So yeah there are other, you know, MPs, Debbie Abrahams has done some good work, Marsha de Cordova has done some good work and other some of the left wing MPs have done really good work as well.

But I mean, none of them will know all this stuff. John McDonnell was around at the time, but he won’t know it because he won’t have seen these memos from the 1990. So none of them will know what’s in this book. All of it. I mean, some of them will know some of it; none of them will know all of it. So, yeah, fingers crossed that they will read it.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. Absolutely. I think that’s probably a good place to leave it, John. I mean, the book is incredibly important, the research is vital. It’s a very powerful read and I hope that every MP that receives a copy does read it and I hope that a lot of people listening today feel moved to go out and find a copy themselves.

So yeah, thank you once again for taking the time to talk to me. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, even though it’s been a distressing subject matter as we know. So thank you.

John Pring:

Thanks Chris, it’s been good. Thank you.

Chris Browne:

That was John Pring on Radicals in Conversation. If you’d like to find out more about The Department, head over to plutobooks.com. Listeners can get 40% off using the coupon PODCAST at the checkout. I would also point people towards the Deaths by Welfare timeline, which is another of John’s projects and a really valuable online resource which lays out all of the evidence of the DWP’s systemic negligence over the years.

You can find that at deathsbywelfare.org. We’ll be back with another episode of Radicals in Conversation next month. So until then, thank you very much for listening and goodbye.