The Department for Work and Pensions has been accused of “a cover-up” after destroying reports into suicides linked to benefits being stopped.
According to reports in virtually every major British publisher, around 50 reviews into deaths following the loss of social security payments before 2015 have been shredded, officials have admitted this and blamed data protection laws for the loss in records.
However, the data watchdog has said there was no requirement to destroy the reports by any particular date and that a “public interest” exemption could have been used.
Linda Cooksey, the grieving sister Tim Salter, a benefit claimant who killed himself soon after his benefits were stopped in 2013, accused the DWP of “trying to cover up” what was happening to “vulnerable” people around the United Kingdom.
But Linda told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What happened about freedom of information? We should be allowed to find out what’s happened.
“Why would they want to destroy them? What are they hiding?”
Linda said she wanted to see the review because “we just want to know why and how they could let it happen.”
She added: “It was a bit of a shock but it doesn’t surprise me at all. They’re trying to cover up all the other peer reviews as well at the same time.”
The shock really starts to sink in when we realised that the DWP destroyed the reviews despite the fact they were at the heart of a two-year freedom of information battle and were reportedly withheld from two independent probes into fit-for-work tests.
Officials finally released heavily redacted versions of 49 peer reviews, carried out up to 2014, to the Disability News Service after a tribunal forced them to, however, families said there were still unanswered questions.
Stephen Timms, a Labour MP and chair of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee has condemned the blackout In information, he said: “It looks as though they’re just throwing the whole thing out and forgetting about it.
“They’re not taking it seriously and they need to be taking it seriously.”
The admission by the DWP into destroying the records came following a Freedom of Information request by Lee Jefferson.
He asked for the titles and dates of all peer reviews, now called Internal Process Reviews since 2010.
The DWP replied: “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”.
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Timms said: “I think families should be entitled to see these reports. The law does not specify five years or six years, and I think this kind of information should be held for longer.”
He added: “I think all of this raises very troubling questions for the department.
“For a long time they refused to address them at all. Now they’re starting to address them but in a very secretive and unsatisfactory way.
“I think for a long time they were very reluctant to accept that what they were doing had contributed to these deaths at all. I think they are now being forced to own up to the fact that is happening, but they’re doing it very reluctantly and very slowly and trying to keep the thing as hush-hush as possible.
“It’s not good enough.”
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