Brits ministerie van 'Sociale Zaken' vernietigde gegevens over suïcides en andere sterfgevallen van uitkeringsgerechtigden

Een bericht van The Canary gaf me een behoorlijk akelig gevoel en ik vroeg me af hoe e.e.a. in Nederland is geregeld: het Britse ministerie van Sociale Zaken heeft onderzoeken naar de dood van uitkeringsgerechtigden vernietigd, zogenaamd uit overwegingen van privacy, terwijl deze onderzoeken aangaven dat mensen ten onrechte hun uitkering verloren en daardoor bijvoorbeeld zich het leven benamen en anderen zelfs door honger om het leven kwamen.....

Eén zo'n geval is dat van David Clapson van wie in 2013 de uitkering werd gestopt, waarna hij in de financiële problemen raakte, zijn elektriciteit werd afgesneden, terwijl hij zijn medicatie voor diabetes in de koelkast bewaarde en deze onbruikbaar werd. Toen men hem dood vond had hij nog een aantal zakjes thee, een blikje soep en een blikje sardines dat al ver over de datum was, op zijn bankrekening stond nog bijna 3,5 pond.......

Debbie Abrahams een parlementslid van Labour was zo kwaad over de naar buiten gekomen zaken, dat ze een vurig pleidooi heeft gevoerd waarbij ze de regering aan de paal nagelde en eiste dat er een eind komt aan deze barbaarse gang van zaken....... Naar schatting overlijden jaarlijks 8.000 mensen in GB die afhankelijk zijn van bijstand, overlijdens die te voorkomen waren als het ministerie eindelijk eens een humaan gezicht toonde en serieus naar deze zaken zou kijken, i.p.v. documenten te vernietigen die e.e.a. aangeven......

Je vraagt je dan af hoe het er hier voorstaat als het gaat om bijstandsgerechtigden, immers van de bijstand kan je niet fatsoenlijk rondkomen..... Het is zonder meer een feit dat van een flink aantal mensen ten onrechte de uitkering werd en wordt stopgezet, is er iemand die deze mensen verder in de gaten houdt, ofwel hoe vergaat het hen daarna? Eén ding is zeker, als er mensen gevonden worden die zich hebben gesuïcideerd, hoor je maar zelden wat de oorzaak voor zo'n zelfdoding is......

Lullig toch dat overheden zoveel tijd hebben om arme mensen het leven onmogelijk te maken, maar geen tijd hebben om de superrijken aan te pakken, tuig dat bijvoorbeeld de Nederlandse belastingpot voor naar schatting 20 miljard euro per jaar oplicht....... (voor bedrijven ligt dat bedrag zelfs op rond de 30 miljard euro en dan worden bedrijven ook nog eens in de watten gelegd wat betreft de te betalen belastingen, zo betalen ze in verhouding zelfs minder dan iemand die het minimumloon verdient.....)

The DWP has destroyed its own investigations into claimant deaths

Steve Topple
25th February 2020

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has admitted it’s destroyed its own investigations into claimant deaths. This would include at least 49 people who had died or taken their own lives. It comes as the DWP has been mired in scandal over people dying on its watch.

The DWP is claiming that it destroyed the reports due to data protection laws. But The Canary has looked into this. It seems not to be the case. Meanwhile, a Labour MP just broke down in parliament talking about claimant deaths. She asked a DWP minister whether he felt “ashamed”. He didn’t answer.

The DWP: countless deaths on its watch

As The Canary has documented, the number of deaths on the DWP’s watch has become a scandal. As Disability News Service (DNS) first reported, the department has had to set up a Serious Case Panel. It will look at the DWP’s Internal Process Reviews (IPRs). These are local DWP investigations when a claimant takes their own life. They also happen when a vulnerable claimant complains to the DWP. But the panel has already faced criticism, not least because some DWP civil servants will sit on it. On 24 February, DWP minister of state Justin Tomlinson said:

The Serious Case Panel met on 30 September 2019 and 7 November 2019 and will meet quarterly from now on.

But he refused to say if the DWP will make the agendas of these panels public.

The Serious Case Panel will be looking at cases like that of Errol Graham. He starved to death after the DWP stopped his benefits:

Ignoring systemic issues

But it won’t be looking into more systemic issues which come from macro data. For example, it seems it won’t investigate figures that show:

• Between April 2013 and 30 April 2018, almost 12 people a day died. They were waiting for the DWP to make a decision on Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claims.
• Between March 2014 and February 2017, around 10 ESA claimants a day died. These were people in the Work-Related Activity Group (WRAG). The DWP said they should be moving towards work.
• Also, in the same period, around one claimant a day died after the DWP said they were “fit for work”.
  

This is because IPRs don’t deal with this kind of information. And as The Canary previously wrote:

the Serious Case Panel will have, at most, around 12 cases a month to look at. On the one hand, this means it could have 36 cases to review at each quarterly meeting. This seems like a lot for one panel to work through. But 36 cases only represents 0.0005% of the seven million total DWP working age claimants. And there’s reason to believe these cases are only the tip of the iceberg.

Since then, the DWP has released the full number of IPRs it did between June 2015 and January 2020. It carried out 131 of these. That’s an average of more than two reviews a month. This is higher than the DWP previously admitted.

But we now know that even the IPRs the Serious Case Panel will be looking at are incomplete. Because the DWP has admitted it destroyed all of those carried out prior to June 2015.

Wiping the records

It was responding to a Freedom of Information (FOI*) request. The DWP stated that:

Peer Reviews were renamed Internal Process Reviews in 2015.

Records prior to 2015-16 have been destroyed or are incomplete in line with GDPR/data retention policies. The retention of customer documentation is directed by the Information  Management Policy, which specifies guidance for the retention of customer claims. The Data Protection Act 2018 dictates that ‘personal data kept for any purpose should not be kept for longer than necessary’.

Thanks to the work of John Pring at DNS, we know how many reviews, as a minimum, the DWP will have destroyed.

As Pring reported, the DWP carried out 49 Peer Reviews between February 2012 and October 2014. It’s unclear how many reviews the DWP did between November 2014 and June 2015. Some of the reviews were critical of how the DWP treated vulnerable claimants.

One stated:

The risk associated with disregarding the possibility that some of these claimants need more support or a different form of engagement is that we fail to recognise more cases like [REDACTED], with consequent potential impact on the claimant.

David Clapson. Remember his name.

One such report could be about David Clapson. His death in 2013 was high profile. As DNS reported, Clapson died after the DWP stopped his benefits. He was diabetic and had run out of electricity. So he had no power for his fridge. It was where he kept his insulin. DNS noted:

An autopsy found his stomach was empty, and the only food left in his flat in Stevenage was six tea bags, a tin of soup and an out-of-date can of sardines. He had just £3.44 left in his bank account.

There has never been an inquest into Clapson’s death. Nor do IPRs from this time now exist.

So, does the law allow the DWP to destroy them?

Bogus claims?

The DWP claims it’s sticking to the Data Protection Act 2018. This is because the reports have people’s personal details in them. The DWP refers to its Information Management Policy in the FOI response. But this document does not say how long it must keep IPRs for. It took another FOI to find this out.

The DWP released its records management policy after an FOI in 2017. The policy from the same year states that internal reviews should be kept for six years. This is the latest publicly available policy. So, it’s using the Data Protection Act to defend destroying IPRs. But the legislation doesn’t match what the DWP is saying.

Legalese

Law firm Beale & Co wrote for Lexology:

The GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] and DPA [Data Protection Act] 2018 specifically set out exemptions where data can be kept for longer than ‘necessary’. These include keeping data for public interest archiving, scientific or historical research, or statistical purposes. If you are keeping data for any of these purposes, this must be your only purpose for holding data and you cannot later use the data for another purpose particularly, for making decisions that may affect an individual whose data you hold. Further, you cannot hold data ‘just in case’ it might be useful in the future.

It also noted:

personal data cannot be kept for longer than you need it. However, there is no specific time limit.

So the DWP can decide itself how long to keep IPRs for. Moreover, it could keep them for as long as it wanted, as it could use them for research or statistics.

But here’s the catch: so far, the DWP has never even bothered to research the information from IPRs properly. Nor has it bothered to check if their recommendations are carried out. It doesn’t class the IPRs as documents for research or statistical use. It classes them as “customer claims”.

The DWP says…

The Canary asked the DWP for comment. We specifically asked it:

• How long it must keep IPRs for.
• What the decision making process was that decided the length of time to keep IPRs.
  

A spokesperson told The Canary that it could only provide those answers if we made an FOI.

Wilful ignorance

The Canary previously wrote:

in January 2017 alone, 10 months before the DWP stopped Graham’s benefits, over 700 people could have died on its watch. The DWP told some they have to work. It told others they have to get ready to work. And it left others waiting for payments right up until their last breath. That’s around 8,000 people a year, dead. Many died amid stress, upset, financial ruin, and misery, amplified by DWP incompetence and neglect.

We now know that this neglect extends to the DWP destroying official documents. Moreover, it previously broke the law by doing the same thing.

“Enough is enough”

But it’s perhaps Labour MP Debbie Abrahams who summed the scandal up best. During a speech in which she broke down in tears and had to stop, she said that “enough is enough”.
Abrahams held a debate on the deaths of DWP claimants since 2014. During it, she named dozens of people who had died, many taking their own lives, after the DWP stopped their benefits. She quoted a government report which says the DWP:

does not have a robust record of all contact from coroners.

Abrahams lost her composure at this point. She said:

How can that be? This is a government department for heaven’s sakes.

She continued, angrily saying of IPRs:

What’s the point of doing them if [DWP staff] are not aware [of them]?. …

It beggars belief. … Do you not feel ashamed?. …

This is just absolutely damning.

At one point she accused Justin Tomlinson of ‘smirking’. She also took direct aim at the press, saying:

this is rarely covered in the media. So I hope everyone in the press gallery is going to be reporting on this. This is a scandal.

And she summed up by saying:

The death of any person as a result of a government policy is nothing more than a scandal. And it’s clear from the cases that I talked about… this is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know what’s going on. For too long, the department has failed to address the effects of its policies. It must now act. Enough is enough.

DWP deaths: systemic and systematic

The DWP destroying IPRs is just the latest, damning twist in this saga. At best, it’s government red tape getting in the way of the sensible functioning of a department. But at worst, the DWP has intentionally destroyed the IPRs. It may have done this to hide its systemic failings and its systematic mistreatment of claimants. We will now never properly be able to hold the DWP to account for so many deaths. Like the death of David Clapson.

Enough is indeed enough. But it has been enough for many years now. And the DWP shows no signs of improving.

Watch Abrahams’ full speech below:

Featured image via Flickr – Matthew Murdoch / Wikimedia – UK Government
============================
FOI: bij ons is dit de Wet openbaarheid van bestuur, ofwel Wob  

Regering May bezuinigt gehandicapten de dood in....... De BBC verzwijgt e.e.a. willens en wetens.......

TheCanary bracht op 16 september jl. een artikel waarin stuitend bewijs wordt geleverd over de BBC, die de Britse regering uit de 'VN-wind' houdt.

De VN heeft een rapport uitgebracht, waarin de bezuinigingen op het budget voor minder valide mensen, door de inhumane neoliberale regering May aan de paal wordt genageld. Volgens het rapport zijn deze bezuinigingen levensbedreigend en leiden tot moord, suïcide en euthanasie......*

De regering May insinueert met haar uitlatingen t.a.v. deze groep zwakkere mensen, dat het parasieten en uitnemers van de sociale zekerheid zijn, ze zouden leven op het belastinggeld van anderen...................... 

Op 14 september jl. publiceerde de VN een audiobestand van de persconferentie over deze zaak, waarin het ook een volledig BBC interview overnam van 10 minuten, een interview met Theresia Degener, voorzitter van de VN commissie voor mensen met een handicap (UNCRPD).

'Vreemd genoeg' zond de BBC maar 20 seconden uit van dit interview...... U had het al begrepen: totaal niet vreemd, daar staatsomroep BBC vooral het regeringsbeleid verdedigt, hoe fout dat beleid ook is

Lees de uitstekende analyse van Steve Topple over deze ongelofelijke zaak (bij mijn noot (*) onder dat artikel nog een kleine aanvulling over het Nederlandse beleid op hetzelfde gebied, dat zoals u wellicht weet, weinig beter is (terwijl de reguliere pers hier, Rutte 2 de hemel in prijst..)......

The BBC didn’t want you to hear the UN’s most damning interview about the UK government in full. So here it is 

SEPTEMBER 15TH, 2017  STEVE TOPPLE

A BBC interview, of which only 20 seconds out of more than 10 minutes were broadcast, has come to light. And it has exposed the UN’s most scathing attack on the Conservative government to date.

Published by the UN, it reveals the organisation thinks that austerity is “life threatening” to many disabled people in the UK. And it sees the government’s actions potentially leading to “killings and euthanasia”, because it has helped create a society where a whole group of people are viewed as “parasites”. But it’s an interview the BBC completely dumbed down for its viewers.

A ‘human catastrophe’

In August, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) met in Geneva, Switzerland. It was assessing if the UK government meets its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People.

And it was publicly unequivocal in its opinion on how disabled people are treated by the Conservative government. Its Chair, Theresia Degener, said in a statement seen by The Canary:

"Evidence before us… reveals that [welfare] cut policies [have] led to human catastrophe in your country, totally neglecting the vulnerable situation people with disabilities find themselves in".

But on 14 September, the UN published the audio of the committee’s concluding press conference. And it left in a full BBC interview with Degener. John Pring at Disability News Service (DNS) discovered the audio; you can read his full analysis here and listen to the full audio here.

Disabled people: ‘parasites’ who could be ‘killed’

In the BBC interview, one of the UN’s most scathing comments was about public attitudes towards disabled people. Degener said [20.43] that the government and the media “have some responsibility” for society seeing [20.12] disabled people as “parasites, living on social benefits… and [living on] the taxes of other people”. And she said [20.23] these “very, very dangerous” attitudes could [20.52] “lead to violence… and if not, to killings and euthanasia”. And she urged [21.10] the government to “stop” this (audio):

Overarching concerns

You can read The Canary‘s full analysis of the UNCRPD report here. Broadly, it only noted two areas which it considered “positive” in the Tory government’s approach to disabled people. But it highlighted nearly 70 criticisms over the Conservative government’s treatment of disabled people. And it made over 90 recommendations to the government. It was these concerns and recommendations that Degener referenced in her BBC interview.

Degener said [11.40] that rights for disabled people in the UK were “going backwards”. She said [12.14] that the Tories have implemented:

"a policy of austerity… which discriminates against disabled people by taking away benefits which were supposed to help disabled people to live an independent life… [one] equal to others…"

Human rights breaches

She went on to explain how the UN believed successive Conservative-led governments had breached “human rights laws” (audio):

Degener continued by saying [14.45] that the UN believes that austerity has left disabled people reliant on “voluntary” support; that disabled people cannot “participate in culture and public life”; that schools are excluding disabled children, leaving parents without “any support”. And she said [15.55] the loss of the Independent Living Fund (ILF) had led to disabled people being “homeless”, “desperate”, and suffering mental health issues. But she also noted [16.34] “terrible” reports of people taking their own lives “because of the cuts”.

The UK government: ‘threatening’ disabled people’s lives

The BBC asked [16.46] Degener why the UN gave “the longest list of conclusions and recommendations” it has ever given to a country. She said [17.05] it was because her committee had “set the bar very high”. But she noted [17.10] that, while the UK “claims to be a world leader when it comes to disability rights”, it is actually going backwards; and that this “worries” the UN “a lot”. She then said [18.25] government policies had become “life threatening to many disabled people” (audio):

Overall, the committee condemned the UK’s attempts to misrepresent the impact of policies through “unanswered questions”, “misused statistics”, and a “smoke screen of statements”. It also said the government had introduced policies and legislation which “fail to implement” disabled people’s rights in “reality”.

The BBC response?

The BBC journalist told [14.17] Deneger that she can “edit” the interview. And edit it the BBC did, as the only section broadcast was 20 seconds, containing some of Degener’s least contentious comments. So The Canary asked the BBC why it chose to edit the interview so heavily; only including a tiny section of Degener’s responses.

A BBC spokesperson told The Canary:

"This is misleading. We make editorial decisions about what is newsworthy for inclusion in our coverage every day which often means using only key parts of interviews. On the News at Six and Ten and radio bulletins we very clearly reported on the UN report and its criticisms of the UK’s record on protecting the rights of disabled people, its concerns about the number of disabled living in poverty and the effects of cuts to benefits – including relevant sections of an interview with Theresa Degener".

The government’s response?

A government spokesperson told DNS:

"We’re disappointed that this report does not accurately reflect the evidence we gave to the UN, and fails to recognise all the progress we’ve made to empower disabled people in all aspects of their lives. We spend over £50bn a year to support disabled people and those with health conditions – more than ever before, and the second highest in the G7. We’re committed to furthering rights and opportunities for all disabled people, which is why it is encouraging that almost 600,000 disabled people have moved into work in the UK over the last four years."

"We’re also a recognised world leader in disability rights and equality, which is why we supported the development of the UN convention".

The UK government and the media must take responsibility

The UN has now reported four times in the space of a year on human rights violations by the Conservative-led government. As one disabled activist told The Canary:

"If this was happening in a Middle Eastern country, the US would probably have invaded by now, under the guise of ‘humanitarian’ grounds".

But the government’s response to all these reports? To simply shrug their shoulders and say they didn’t believe them. And now, we see the BBC cherry-picking the most palatable parts of an interview with the UN to broadcast. There is no discernible reason why the BBC could not have published the interview in full on its website. But as the UN implied, the BBC and the rest of the media must take some responsibility for disabled people’s appalling situation. The full responsibility, however, lies directly at the Conservative government’s door.

This article was updated at 5.10pm on Friday 15 September to reflect a statement from the BBC.

Hier de link naar het originele artikel.
===================================

* Nu nog een VN rapport, waarin de Nederlandse bezuinigingen op het budget voor invaliden, chronisch zieken, ouderen en de GGZ zorg aan de kaak worden gesteld......... Intussen kan hier als bewezen worden geacht, dat deze bezuinigingen al tot een fiks aantal suïcides hebben geleid...... Met dank aan hare VVD kwaadaardigheid Schippers en PvdA opperschoft Martin 'die vrouw' van Rijn....... (en ja, de zorg over de schutting van de lokale politiek gooien, is een hele smerige manier van bezuinigen, die zoals gezegd veel mensen in diepe ellende heeft gestort........