The Department for Work and Pensions has created a new safeguarding team tasked with ensuring the most vulnerable customers get the help and support they need, watchdog MPs have been told.
The move follows a May report from the Work and Pensions Select Committee that accused DWP of being “deficient” in its treatment of vulnerable clients and called for a “deep rooted culture change” at the department.
MPs had spent two years on the inquiry, which was launched after safeguarding concerns were raised involving several high-profile deaths of claimants.
Over the summer, DWP’s 2024-25 annual report and accounts stated that 59 internal process reviews were launched during the year following claimant deaths. The figure represents a significant increase from 2023-24, when the figure was 40.
Details of DWP’s new safeguarding team were contained in a letter sent to the Work and Pensions Committee ahead of an evidence session with newly-installed secretary of state Pat McFadden and longstanding permanent secretary Sir Peter Schofield.
In the letter, McFadden said the department had undertaken a “comprehensive review” of its safeguarding practices that included comparing DWP’s current approach to best practice in other organisations, such as health and education.
He said consultation feedback from the Pathways to Work green paper and the Work and Pensions Committee’s own safeguarding report had led to the identification of “key areas” for improvement.
“We have developed a high-level strategy to prioritise short, medium, and long-term actions,” the secretary of state said. “We are now working on a more detailed plan of the actions we need to take.”
McFadden said the first priority for the work was “leadership and accountability”.
He said an executive lead and dedicated safeguarding team have now been established, supported by the department’s chief medical adviser, Gail Allsopp.
Speaking at a Work and Pensions Committee evidence session on Wednesday last week, McFadden told MPs it was inevitable that some of DWP’s approximately 20 million service users would be vulnerable.
“They are going to have a lot of issues that make their lives very stressful,” he said. “We see this in our role as constituency MPs as well, so it’s important that the department and its operations understand that and treats all these customers with respect and in the right way.”
He said “level one” safeguarding training is now being offered to all civil servants in the department, with a higher level of training being provided to medical health practitioners.
“It’s important that they get that and they understand the training and the responsibilities that they have,” the secretary of state said. “I also think it’s important in terms of a line of responsibility in the department.”
He said the department now has a specific director general responsible for safeguarding, while chief medical adviser Allsop is leading on much of the work in the area and “doing a good job” on it.
McFadden said that when tragedies involving DWP customers were followed up with serious case panels and reviews, there was “understandable public scepticism” about some of the language that emerged in relation to “lessons learned”.
“It is important to have these serious case panels. They do help us to learn,” he said. “But I hope that the department doesn’t just look at this with a rear-view mirror, learning from what’s gone wrong, but actually has an active process to try to make sure that we deal with people in the best way that we can.”
Asked directly whether DWP should have a “system-based” approach to safeguarding, which was one of the select committee’s May recommendations, McFadden replied that it should.
“I think you’re right,” he told committee chair Debbie Abrahams. “It’s not just for the frontline staff, they’re of course dealing directly with the most vulnerable customers, they’re often not the most high-paid civil servants either, and we ask a lot of them. But it should be in Caxton House too. It should be in the department.”
It’s clearly not ‘job done’
McFadden said that having a dedicated director general for safeguarding working with the department’s chief medical adviser was part of having a system-based approach. However, he conceded that there is more work to do.
“I’m not going to sit here and say it’s job done. It’s clearly not,” he said. “But it is something that we take seriously.”
DWP perm sec Schofield agreed the department’s current status on safeguarding was “progress made” rather than “job done”.
He said DWP needed to be thinking about how it reaches out and supports people with complex needs, making sure it's aware of them in the frontline, and then also to be thinking about how safeguarding works.
Schofield said training had focused initially on around 5,300 clinical professionals, many of whom work with outsourced providers, with the wider rollout of more basic training for frontline staff ongoing.
He said he had encouraged the department’s senior civil servants to undertake that level-one training at a meeting last week.
“I want this to be embedded in everything that we do – it’s policymaking and other systems as well as the frontline,” he said. “But obviously the frontline is where the most direct implications come through.”
One of the Work and Pensions Committee’s main May recommendations was the introduction of a statutory duty for DWP to safeguard vulnerable customers. MPs said the department should have a legal responsibility to refer vulnerable claimants to other agencies that have a duty of care, with the secretary of state held accountable for the safeguarding duty.
McFadden’s letter to the committee said the government “remains open” to considering the proposal. But it said DWP’s “immediate” priority was to ensure its internal safeguarding approach is "robust, consistent, and fully integrated across the department”.