The DWP rejected a coroner’s call to act to prevent benefit claimants taking their own lives, following the suicide of a young woman who had told her work coach that she intended to kill herself.
Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that DWP dismissed both the coroner’s plea to take action, and the findings of an inquest jury which had concluded that a jobcentre’s failings had contributed to the death of 31-year-old Faiza Ahmed from Limehouse, east London.
But the documents have also led to fresh allegations of institutional racism and have again exposed the cruelty and harshness of DWP’s benefit sanctions regime.
This week, Faiza’s brother, Mohammed, told the Disability News Service (DNS) that DWP had shown no remorse after his sister’s death.
He has backed growing calls for a judge-led inquiry into links between DWP and the deaths of claimants.
The eight-day inquest led to a narrative verdict by the jury, which concluded that failures by DWP, London Ambulance Service and the Metropolitan police all contributed to his sister’s death on 7 November 2014.
The coroner, Mary Hassell, produced a prevention of future deaths (PFD) report – a step taken by coroners when they think individuals or organisations can take action to prevent further deaths – and sent it to the police, ambulance service and DWP.
Their responses have only been released for the first time this week following a series of freedom of information requests by DNS.
The report was written in January 2016, just a few months after DNS had revealed the existence of another PFD, also written by Mary Hassell, following the suicide of Michael O’Sullivan, from north London.
That PFD, which concluded that O’Sullivan’s death was triggered by the decision to wrongly find him fit for work, had led to the prime minister twice being questioned over DWP’s failings in the House of Commons.
The documents show that, when responding to the PFD report written by Mary Hassell at the end of Faiza Ahmed’s inquest, DWP dismissed both the jury’s findings and the coroner’s call for action.
The inquest in January 2016 had lasted eight days.
It heard that Faiza had a history of mental distress and became suicidal during two days in November 2014, after reporting an attempted rape in her home.
The inquest heard of failings by the police officers who visited her after she reported the attempted rape early on 6 November, and further failings of the force and the ambulance service after she called for an ambulance the next afternoon and said she wanted to kill herself.
She took her own life shortly after the emergency services left her flat that afternoon.
But earlier that day – as described by the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone, who covered the inquest in January 2016 – she had visited Poplar jobcentre to explain why she was three days late to sign on for jobseeker’s allowance.
A statement from her brother, read out at the inquest, described how Faiza had previously been sanctioned by the jobcentre for turning up late and missing appointments, and lived with the constant fear of being sanctioned, and the understanding that DWP did not believe her when she said she had depression.
Mohammed told DNS this week that Faiza had been sanctioned at least once and was “regularly threatened” with further sanctions.
He said this had a “horrible” impact on her. “Whenever we saw her, she was absolutely broken from it,” he said. “She was scared, worried and upset.
When Faiza arrived at the jobcentre on 7 November, she was given a form by the work coach to explain her failure to sign on for jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) on time.
She wrote on the form that, between 4 and 7 November, she had been “busy trying to kill myself, drinking non-stop”. She left the moment she handed over the form.
After she had gone, the work coach discussed what she had written with a manager, but they decided not to contact the emergency services.
DWP’s “six-point plan” says its staff should summon emergency help if a claimant declares an attempt to kill themselves and is “distressed, at serious risk or in immediate danger”.
But that action was not taken. Instead, the inquest heard, someone at the jobcentre made an urgent referral to the community mental health team, but not until five days later. By that time, Faiza had been dead for nearly five days.
Faiza’s brother, Mohammed, an officer with London Fire Brigade, is certain that racism lay at the heart of the way his sister was treated by DWP, even if it was “indirect” and not immediately obvious.
This was because the harshness of austerity and DWP’s welfare reforms had a disproportionate impact on people of colour, he said.
He said: “You can’t separate it. It definitely, definitely had an impact; 100 per cent it was there.”
He believes the jobcentre would have called the emergency services if his sister had been a white woman.
He added: “The class thing doubles it up. Would it have happened to a young white woman in Hampstead Heath? No, not in my opinion.”
He has backed growing calls for an independent inquiry into links between DWP and the deaths of benefit claimants.
He said: “A judge-led inquiry on its own would be some justice. It would at least have some weight and would get justice for those families.”
Source and for more information see DWP ignored coroner’s call to take action to save claimants from suicide available from disabilitynewsservice.com.
Also available from disabilityrightsuk.org: