The benefits system gives officials “no incentive” to be “curious” about a claimant’s situation, charities have warned.
Giving evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee’s inquiry on safeguarding vulnerable claimants, representatives of Women’s Aid, Mind, the National Autistic Society and Poverty Action Group also told MPs on Wednesday that frontline DWP staff need better training on how to support vulnerable benefits claimants, more support to deal with complex cases and relief from caseload pressures.
Sophie Francis-Cansfield, head of policy at Women’s Aid, said: “As a former DWP employee told Women’s Aid, you are not incentivised to understand or be curious about the wider situation of a claimant, because there is so much focus on just driving claimants into employment, even if it doesn't mean they're going to be in it in the long term, because a suitable tailored approach hasn't been taken.”
“The issue is we have a system that is very robotic, essentially, and fundamentally un-person centred,” Tim Nicholls, assistant director of policy, research and strategy at the National Autistic Society, added.
“That does not give space for professional curiosity.”
Francis-Cansfield said the department also sometimes even struggles with getting “the basics of human decency” right, let alone extra measures for particularly vulnerable claimants.
“We had a survivor who had fled her perpetrator when she was two months pregnant, and further down the line, she was in the job centre, she felt a little bit dizzy, and asked for a glass of water, and she was told no, she wasn't allowed a glass of water,” she recalled.
Asked about the DWP’s training package for staff engaging with vulnerable claimants on a daily basis, which the department has described as “comprehensive”, Nicholls said the National Autistic Society recently carried out a poll of autistic people within the benefits system, and found that seven in 10 respondents did not think their assessors had a sufficient understanding of autism.
Nicholls said the DWP’s training materials has “lots of very clinical-style information” but lacks information on how to help claimants with day-to-day issues.
“If you want to know how to do training properly, listen: co-produce, co-design,” he said.
“I think you’d end up with not only better satisfaction within claimants but probably much better satisfaction among the assessors and workforce in DWP, who will feel like they’re delivering a higher quality service and [are] in fewer situations where they feel out of their depth and unsatisfied with the information they’ve got at their fingertips.”
Carri Swann, a welfare rights adviser at Child Poverty Action Group, said another issue is that frontline staff do not have enough support to help deal with the varying needs of claimants. She said the DWP should have in-house expert teams in DWP to enable frontline staff, when faced with a problem on which they have limited training, to escalate the query to an expert with a higher level of training.
“From our evidence from advisers dealing with frontline cases, we’re not seeing that happening enough,” Swann said.
Francis-Cansfield agreed, saying: “Whilst having champions and leads isn’t going to be the golden bullet, it is helpful. Having a domestic abuse lead in job centres would support with some of the breadth of challenges that they face on a daily basis.”
Swann said another issue was that high caseloads which means advisers don’t have enough time dedicate to each claimant.
She pointed to a survey of DWP staff carried out by the Work and Pensions Committee in April last year on the safeguarding of vulnerable claimants, which found that 62% of respondents felt they did not have enough time in their day to deal with safeguarding concerns carefully, correctly and in a timely manner.
“Giving DWP staff the benefit of the doubt, many of them are doing very challenging jobs for all the right reasons,” Swann said. "What is stopping them from getting it right in every case? I would point to the question of caseload and the time available to dedicate to individuals.”
“There is clearly a gulf between what the guidance says should happen and what happens in practice,” she added. “If we are looking for root causes, it is not my place to speculate, I do not work at the DWP, but time to dedicate to people seems as important as new guidance, new training and other measures.”
Minesh Patel, associate director of policy and influencing at Mind, said one way to give staff more time to focus on individual cases would be to reduce the number of face-to-face assessments by making more decisions based on paper assessment.
“I think that would help to free up more of the time of work coaches to give more in depth, holistic personal support to people [for whom] there is a need for that face to face assessment,” he said.
Nicholls said reassessments should also be less frequent – that requiring people with stable circumstances to “come back every two or three years is placing a burden on them and the system that could be avoidable”.
The case for a statutory safeguarding duty
The inquiry – asking whether DWP’s approach to safeguarding needs to change – was initially launched in July 2023, following reports that a number of its “customers” had died. It closed in May after the general election was called, as inquiries cannot be carried over into the next parliament. In November, the committee announced it would formally reopen the inquiry “in light of the seriousness of this subject”.
One of the key questions of the inquiry is whether a safeugarding duty should be introduced in the DWP, and if so, what it should look like.
Francis-Cansfield said introducing a statutory duty to safeguard the wellbeing of vulnerable claimants could help to resolve the "curiosity" culture problem.
The Work and Pensions Committee inquiry has asked for input on whether there should be such a duty and what it should look like.
Francis-Cansfield told MPs introducing a safeguarding duty would – alongside improving the department’s culture – help to meet department objectives such as maximising employment and improving people’s quality of life. She said: “It's well evidenced that applying for an array of benefits, particularly Universal Credit, is incredibly stressful and has a very kind of negative impact on individuals, but particularly for survivors of domestic abuse who have experienced all sorts of horrendous experiences and traumas. They talk about how applying for benefits and the interactions that they've had with job centres both recalls but also mirrors the abuse that they've experienced from their perpetrator.”
Swann said introducing the duty would be appropriate “given the type and magnitude of the power that DWP has in people's lives and the harm and, unfortunately, deaths that we've seen sometimes associated with the use of that power or the threat of exercising that power in certain ways”. She said this could include a statutory duty of disclosure, requiring that the DWP disclose to third party agencies, such as support networks, when there is about to be a risk to a claimant, and an enhanced duty of enquiry, so that the DWP has to make certain enquiries, such as seeking out further medical information, before making certain decisions about someone's benefits.
But she added that “there should be upstream changes to benefit rules that prevent these very acute situations and risks from arising”.
Nicholls, meanwhile, said he was in favour in principle but that it would depend on how the duty and definition of vulnerability is framed. He pointed to similar regimes, such as social care, having an “incredibly high” bar for when the duty is triggered. “We hear day in day out, from autistic people who are not able to get the support when safeguarding concerns are raised,” he said. “We need a system and a duty that doesn’t rely on people being in crisis before it's triggered.”
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said: “Supporting claimants is a priority across the department, with support in place to ensure customers are treated with dignity and respect, and claimants with complex needs are given the support they need.
“Millions of people rely on our welfare system every year and it is vital that it can be accessed by all who need it. That’s why we will work closely with people with experience and expertise on these issues to consider how to address these challenges and build a better system so that it provides the support people need and genuinely helps them back into work.”