The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has finally published a long‑overdue report under the title Advanced Customer Support: Learning and improving from serious cases. The document offers insights into its Internal Process Reviews (IPRs) — investigations opened into serious cases involving vulnerable benefit claimants. It was originally published in July, and then updated on 18 August. However, instead of transparency, what emerges is a chilling portrait of a department more concerned with self‑preservation than public accountability.

Secrecy at the core: years of Internal Process Reviews kept hidden

IPRs are supposed to be lenses through which the DWP reviews its own failures — and ostensibly, learns from them. Yet for years, these serious‑case reviews have operated under the radar. Only in November 2024 did the DWP finally release IPR statistics for the period April 2023 to March 2024 — data it conspicuously omitted from its Annual Report and Accounts — a corrective move disguised as transparency.

Behind closed doors, advocacy groups have uncovered a harrowing trend: reviews into claimant deaths linked to DWP action more than doubled in certain periods. Between 2019 and 2020, the DWP opened 43 death‑related IPRs; this rose to 59, then dipped to 38 — but the trend is unmistakable. Campaigners have questioned why these reviews were kept secret for so long, and why vital safeguarding failures have been allowed to fester in the dark.

The timing of the DWP release

The July 2025 IPR publication arrived suspiciously soon after MPs voted to cut health‑related Universal Credit payments, prompting accusations that the timing was politically motivated. Campaigners suggest this allowed the DWP to release harmful data only when it was too late to influence parliamentary scrutiny.

Indeed, Vox Political has filed Freedom of Information requests and alerted select committees to investigate:

• Why were figures on deaths and serious harm withheld until after the benefit cuts vote?

• Why have IPR recommendations dating back to 2020 remained unpublished?

• Are systemic risks ever proactively monitored — or only examined after tragedies emerge?

Inaction and concealment

Disability News Service only recently highlighted “secrecy over panel that examines its own fatal errors”, as DWP ministers refused to publish internal reviews, claiming they constituted “internal improvement work,” and therefore were not meant for public release. Finally, Disability News Service forced the DWP to publish some of these. 

Parliamentarians have weighed in too. In March 2025, DWP officials publicly acknowledged they would — for the first time — disclose IPR information and learning from serious cases. But critics argue this is little more than a reactive concession driven by mounting pressure, rather than genuine reform.

Meanwhile, MPs, campaigners, and disability organisations have called for an independent body to oversee serious harm cases, arguing Internal Process Reviews alone are not enough to restore public trust.

MPs on the Work and Pensions Select Committee go further: they call for a statutory safeguarding duty, independent scrutiny, and systematic recording and annual publication of harm and death cases — steps DWP has long resisted.

The DWP: broken yet investigating itself?

This raises a fundamental question: how does the DWP — tasked with safeguarding the most vulnerable — allow exactly the type of tragedies that warrant internal investigations?

The very existence of IPRs signals systemic failure, not improvement. Ideally, welfare systems should be preventative, not reactive; they should protect, not only atone. Instead, IPRs are triggered by real human harm: suicidal claimants ignored, procedural breakdowns following deaths, failure to safeguard at‑risk individuals.

A Guardian report from March 2025 shows the department has repeatedly shelved or suppressed internal criticism. In one instance, a whistleblower was blocked from giving evidence to a review of Carers’ Allowance overpayments — an episode eerily similar in its suppression of internal critique.

Add to that the National Audit Office’s finding that claimant service has “fallen short” across multiple benefits — including low satisfaction, late payments, and failures to meet performance benchmarks — reinforcing that these systemic issues extend well beyond a few isolated incidents.

A department more skilled at concealment than care

In publishing “Learning and improving from serious cases”, the DWP wants to appears to have taken a public step toward transparency. However, even if that were to be believed, it has only acted out of necessity, not principle. Years of hiding the very failures it was supposed to prevent now lie exposed, leaving behind serious doubts: how can we trust a department that waits until someone dies before it even begins to learn?

The DWP must now do more than publish figures: it must rebuild trust by transforming how it learns, acts, and — most critically — shares what it learns with those it is supposed to help. Ultimately, this should be through a public inquiry, and then the disbanding and rebuilding of the department altogether.

Featured image via the Canary