Coroners have warned the DWP about dying claimants nine times since 2013

Between 2013 and 2024, coroners issued the Department for Work and Pensions nine Prevention of Future Deaths reports following the deaths of people claiming benefits. These are not letters of concern. A Prevention of Future Deaths report is a formal notice made under Schedule 5 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, issued by a judicial office holder who has heard sworn evidence at an inquest and concluded that other people will die in the same circumstances unless the organisation named takes action. The recipient has 56 days to respond in writing and set out what it intends to do.

Reporting by the Disability News Service, which has tracked the department’s responses for well over a decade, found that in all that time the DWP has publicly accepted a coroner’s findings, expressed remorse and made substantial changes to policy and practice on exactly one occasion.

What a departmental response usually looks like

The replies follow a recognisable pattern. The department acknowledges the coroner’s concerns, sets out the safeguarding processes that already exist, and describes improvement work that in many cases was announced before the inquest began. What it very rarely does is accept that any of those processes caused the death under examination.

That matters because a Prevention of Future Deaths report is not campaigning material and it is not an opinion piece. It is written by a coroner who has heard departmental witnesses give evidence under oath and cross-examined them on it, and who has then concluded that the risk to other people remains live.

Errol Graham

Errol Graham starved to death in his flat in Nottingham in 2018, eight months after his Employment and Support Allowance was stopped. He had missed a work capability assessment, his payments were terminated, his gas and electricity were cut off, and nobody from any agency came to the door. When his body was found he weighed four and a half stone.

The inquest identified a series of missed opportunities to share information about his condition and to support him. The coroner concluded that the safety net which should surround vulnerable people in society had, in his case, holes in it.

She did not, however, issue a Prevention of Future Deaths report. The department had given an assurance that it would carry out a safeguarding review, and that assurance persuaded her that a formal notice was unnecessary. A barrister acting for the Graham family later told the Work and Pensions Select Committee that the promised review never took place.

The one statutory mechanism that exists to force a public body to change had been switched off by a promise that was not kept.

Philippa Day

Philippa Day took her own life in 2019 after a series of errors in the handling of her disability benefit claim cut her weekly income from around £228 to £60. Her inquest ran for weeks. In January 2021 the coroner set out in detail the systemic problems at the DWP that had contributed to her taking an overdose, and issued a Prevention of Future Deaths report.

This is the exception that proves the rule. The department accepted the findings, apologised and made changes to its practice. Getting to that point required a death, an inquest lasting several weeks, and a family with legal representation prepared to see it through.

The figure nobody will publish

There is no official statistic for how many benefit claimants have died following a departmental decision. In 2021 the BBC identified 82 cases in which claimants had died after some alleged DWP activity, such as the termination of a benefit. That number came from internal reviews rather than any published dataset, and it exists only because journalists went looking for it.

The Work and Pensions Committee has since called for an overhaul of the way the department handles cases where claimants come to serious harm, including independent scrutiny of the Internal Process Reviews that the DWP currently conducts on itself and publishes only in redacted form.

What would actually change this

Three things would make a measurable difference and none of them require primary legislation to begin. Every Prevention of Future Deaths report issued to the department, along with its response, could be published together in one place rather than scattered across judiciary websites and freedom of information disclosures. Internal Process Reviews could be reviewed by somebody outside the department. And the decision to stop a person’s only source of income could trigger a welfare check rather than a letter.

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