Ms. Coffey took over as Work and Pensions Secretary on 8 September 2019, just four days after her predecessor, Amber Rudd, had secured £106 million for a new DWP Excellence Plan.
One-third of that money – £36 million – was allocated to improving safety, support for “customers with complex needs” and decision-making, and learning from its mistakes.
An internal DWP document drawn up several months later – obtained by a campaigner under the Freedom of Information Act – appears to show how Amber Rudd had intended to deliver the plan.
During her three-year tenure as the head of the DWP, a series of decisions were taken to weaken the plan, which was supposed to cut the number of claimant deaths, improve support for “the most vulnerable” and provide a “more compassionate” culture within the Department.
The DNS has so far confirmed at least six ways in which the DWP Excellence Plan was watered down under Ms. Coffey’s leadership, after the Department had already secured funding for the plan from the Treasury through her predecessor, Amber Rudd.
Throughout Therese Coffey’s period in charge of DWP, from September 2019 to September 2022, disabled people continued to die due to her Department’s failings.
Among them was, Sophia Yuferev who is believed to have died in October 2021.
Another was Philip Pakree, who died on Boxing Day 2020.
The DWP’s own figures show the Department started 133 secret Internal Process Reviews (IPRs) into links between its actions and deaths and serious harm caused to benefit claimants, between July 2020 and June 2022.
Among the decisions taken under Ms. Coffey’s leadership of the DWP was to abandon plans to pilot a scheme – SignpostingPlus – that would have tested ways of supporting claimants who were “beginning to struggle to cope, before they become harder to help through entrenched disadvantage”.
However, the DWP told the DNS that it holds no information about SignpostingPlus, blaming the pandemic for the decision to abandon the project.
The DWP Excellence Plan also intended to “reduce the impact of serious cases (including customer suicide)” and measure how successful the Department was in reducing the number of serious cases.
But the Department told DNS that it does not hold information about how successful it was in reducing serious cases because a “measure was not chosen”.
The plan also described how a new “Safeguarding Improvement Team” would “proactively introduce processes, procedures and policies to protect vulnerable customers and improve the effectiveness of DWP interventions”.
However, the Department told DNS: “No information is held about a Team named the Safeguarding Improvement Team.”
Another key part of the DWP Excellence Plan was to introduce a Serious Case Panel, “with independent membership”.
But the DWP, under Ms. Coffey’s leadership, decided to water down that proposal, ensuring that the panel was filled instead with senior DWP executives.
The plan also laid out a series of potential “Critical Success Factors” (CSFs), which would determine whether the Department had achieved its goal to make its services less harmful and less likely to lead to claimant suicides and other deaths.
Under another part of the plan, the Department introduced “decision assurance calls”, which are supposed to enable staff making decisions on benefit claims to seek out and clarify further information about a claim and “provide support to customers to transition to other benefits”.
One potential CSF would have shown how many customers received a decision assurance call, but the DWP has told DNS that it would be too expensive to find out how many such calls had been made because “the requested data is not held centrally”.
Ken Butler DR UK’s Welfare Rights and Policy Adviser said: “The abandoning of key aspects of the funded DWP’s Excellence Plan is shameful and warrants investigation.
“The cost of living crisis makes it more important than ever that safeguarding of claimants be a DWP priority.
“The new Work and Pensions Secretary, should urgently revisit the Plan and take steps to ensure its implementation”.
Source and for more information see Coffey’s DWP watered down key parts of plan to prevent suicides available from disabilitynewsservice.com
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