DWP under pressure to admit creating fake benefits claimants to praise cuts
Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith under pressure to reveal what he knew about leaflets bearing fake testimonies from benefit claimants
The Department of Work and Pensions have got themselves into a right royal mess in the last few days. Somewhere, in a dark, dingy corner of Whitehall, somebody birthed what at first had seemed a good idea. The public have been crying out against benefit cuts for months, and the new measures to sanction claimants who do not meet targets set to them by job centre staff.
The DWP then proceeded to publish leaflets and send them out to job centres, explaining how and why their benefits would be cut, and what sanctions could be expected by not living up to the expectations of the support workers who signed off on their weekly payments. The leaflets also provided official-looking testimonies from benefits claimants who had been reformed and felt invigorated by the wrist-slapping forced upon them by the DWP, including one called Sarah who said “I didn’t think that a CV would help me but my work coach said that all employers need one. I didn’t have a good reason for not doing it and I was told I would lose some of my [benefits] payment. I decided to complete the CV and told my work coach. I got a letter to say my benefit would go down for two weeks… It was longer than a week because I’d missed a meeting with my work coach back in March.” The last line, sickly sweet in its delivery, reads “my benefit is back to normal now and I’m really pleased with how my CV looks. It’s going to help me when I’m ready to go back to work.”
This ridiculous account, as it later turned out, was completely fabricated by DWP staff, supposedly based on “conversations they had had with claimants”. This was revealed this morning in a freedom of information request from Welfare Weekly, and the Work and Pension secretary Iain Duncan Smith has been under fire since to admit what, if anything, he knew about this grotesque charade. He has so far declined to comment, but the leaflets have been taken out of circulation and the department has issued an apology. The event has been a stark reminder of the Tories’ ideological obsession to cut the state, no matter what the price.
