A coroner has criticised the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) after a woman died from an overdose in the wake of a six-month official investigation that left her with soaring universal credit debts.
Fiona Butler, the assistant coroner for Rutland and North Leicestershire, wrote a Prevention of Future Deaths (PFD) report to the DWP highlighting its failures to respond to the victim’s mental health issues.
The woman, who the Observer is not naming, had a 20-year history of anxiety and depression, but this had been managed with medication until her mental health declined in October 2022 after the DWP told her that its performance review team was investigating her universal credit payments.
“She was diagnosed with adjustment disorder, an excessive reaction to stress that involves negative thoughts, strong emotions and changes in a person’s behaviour,” Butler wrote in her PFD report. “I heard evidence from a consultant psychiatrist that the trigger stressor for this was the DWP performance review, suggested overpayment and potential debt.”
Universal credit “overpayments” happen when the DWP calculates that someone has been paid more benefit than they are entitled to. More than 10% of universal credit is “overpaid” each year, often because of the way the benefit system is designed and the difficulties it has in responding to claimants’ fluctuating incomes. The DWP’s efforts to recoup overpayments can leave claimants facing large debts which they must repay through cuts to their benefits.
Butler’s report details several DWP failings during its lengthy investigation into the victim’s benefits. It found at least six missed opportunities to record information about her vulnerability on the DWP computer system, “despite [the victim] being tearful and distressed on the telephone on more than one occasion and advising the DWP of information surrounding her mental health and her inability to cope”.
As a result, DWP staff were not alerted to her vulnerability and did not change the way they communicated with her. “The trigger for mental health decline and adjustment disorder continued,” Butler wrote.
The DWP also failed to act on numerous requests, in light of the woman’s mental health risks, to communicate with her via her daughter. “This was a simple request and had been renewed by [the victim] during telephone calls and journal entries to the DWP,” the PFD report said. “The request which had been made in writing by [her] daughter sat in another DWP computer system for a period of four months but even when uploaded to the main DWP computer system was not acted upon.”
Instead, in the four weeks before she overdosed, the claimant received six communications from the DWP – two phone calls requesting detailed information, a universal credit online claimant journal log that she didn’t understand, and three separate letters which together increased the debt she owed the DWP by 75%.
In May 2023, six days after receiving her last correspondence from the DWP, she took the overdose. The inquest found that she had not intended to take her own life, but the drugs caused irreversible damage to her liver, and she died in hospital the following month.
“Those mental health professionals who had worked with [her] throughout seven months in which her mental health had deteriorated gave evidence to me that the recurrent and predominant cause of [her] increased anxiety was the DWP performance review,” Butler wrote. “I find on the basis of the evidence I have heard and read that this was the case.”
She concluded: “I heard evidence from the DWP of plans to introduce a number of changes. What I did not hear was evidence about how DWP operatives were going to be trained, upskilled and refreshed in their knowledge (given the toolkit already available to them) to ensure the issues identified … and aren’t repeated with other vulnerable individuals.”
The case comes just three months after another coroner warned that DWP procedures “may not be practical for those with mental health illness and can exacerbate symptoms”.
A DWP spokesperson said: “Our thoughts are with the victim’s family at this distressing time. We will review the coroner’s report and respond shortly.”
