Forum Home → Discussion → Other benefit issues → Thread
DWP staff admit inflicting ‘psychological harm’ on claimants
From Disability News Service:
DWP staff and managers deliberately inflicted psychological harm on benefit claimants, engaged in unofficial sanctioning targets, and pushed disabled people into work despite the risk to their health, shocking new testimony has revealed.
The evidence comes from new interviews with 10 civil servants who worked for the DWP and its contractors under the coalition government between 2010 and 2015.
They spoke – on the condition of strict anonymity – to academics from Sheffield Hallam University, who have now shown how the introduction of a more punitive social security system, with harsher benefit sanctions and conditionality, inflicted years of “institutional violence” on claimants between 2010 and 2015 ...