Those Slippery People - Government Finds DWP Blameless

DWP COMPLAINTS - Our friends at Benefits at Work sent this today: 

DWP Not guilty after all

The government has found the DWP blameless in relation to universal credit (UC) adverts last year which caused an outcry and were banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

The adverts, pretending to be news articles, were found by the ASA to be misleading in at least three different ways.

This included the fact that statistics used by the DWP to show that people move into work faster on UC were five years out of date and related to people who had only been in work for a few hours.

However, an investigation by Government Communication Service (GCS) claimed that the ruling by the ASA was ‘harsh’ and that adopting ‘a more facts-based approach’ would lead to ‘dryer less impactful messages.’

Of course, a facts-based approach might also lead to the truth being told about UC, something which the DWP seems keen to avoid wherever possible.

LABOUR Calls for missing coroners reports to be published

Vicky Foxcroft, labour shadow minister for disabled people, has called on the DWP and Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to publish two missing reports on the deaths of benefits claimants.

The coroners reports were written in 2015 and 2016 and were both Prevention of Future Deaths reports, which highlight failures in practice by the DWP which could lead to the deaths of more claimants.

These are reports which the DWP was required to act upon.

And the MoJ was supposed to publish on its website

Without publication, it is impossible to tell whether the DWP did act upon them.

Disability News Service has made a string of unsuccessful attempts to obtain copies of the reports.

The MoJ claim that it would be impossible to find them because the reports “are filed under a limited number of categories but these do not include reference to the ‘DWP’”.

However, only around 500 such reports are created a year, so it really wouldn’t be that difficult to identify the missing ones.

The DWP meanwhile, insist that the reports are confidential and it is up to the MoJ to publish them.

Meanwhile, claimants continue to die needlessly because of poor practice by the DWP.

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