Tue 4 Feb 2020 08.39 EST
Last modified on Tue 4 Feb 2020 08.41 EST
Here is what we know. Errol Graham weighed four and a half stone when he died. The 57-year-old, who had severe social anxiety, starved to death just months after officials stopped his disability benefits for missing his fit-for-work assessment. Bailiffs discovered his emaciated body as they knocked down his door to evict him. When he was found, his Nottingham flat had no gas or electricity. The only food in the kitchen was two tins of fish, four years out of date.
The harrowing details that emerged around Graham’s death are still fresh. But they are also aching in their familiarity. Over the past decade, a mix of cost-cutting and outsourcing has meant disabled people have lost their social security en masse, and with all too predictable consequences. Mark Wood, 44, who had a number of complex mental health conditions, starved to death in 2013 – four months after his sickness benefits were cut off. Jodey Whiting, 42, who had bipolar disorder and was on daily morphine, killed herself a fortnight after having her benefits stopped in 2016. David Clapson, a diabetic ex-soldier, died in 2014 of a severe lack of insulin; a benefit sanction meant the 59-year-old couldn’t afford to eat or put credit on his electricity card to keep the fridge for his insulin working.
Graham is not so much an aberration of the benefits system but the latest in a long line of its victims. They are Britain’s deja vu deaths, where a bare cupboard or unpaid electric metre are the warning signs of institutional neglect.
It’s entirely possible for our society to create a safety net that protects us in hard times and ill health. The truth is we have simply chosen not to
I’ve been reporting on these cases since the coalition government’s so-called “welfare reforms” first kicked in. For my book, Crippled, last year I wrote a section on disabled people who had died after having their benefits pulled. I collated names alongside scraps from local papers with washed out photos. Their lives – and deaths – are complex but the pattern is clear. A line from a family member disclosing that their loved one was isolated and struggling. A quote from a coroner, often about the impact experienced by the deceased of having their only income removed. Sometimes a disabled person slowly starves. Occasionally, they freeze.
This stuff doesn’t make the front pages or the evening news bulletins. It took two years for Graham’s death to be picked up, and only then because his daughter-in-law reached out to a journalist. He died alone in a cold flat and no one but his family cared until last week.
It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. Most weeks there is a new story about the cruelty and incompetence of the benefits system, to the point where the most egregious injustices are passed by with a weary shrug. It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations found the UK’s treatment of disabled people to be a “human catastrophe”, and yet ministers carried on unabashed. We could call it Britain’s not-quite scandal – the national outage that never quite made the grade.
The greatest travesty of welfare reform isn’t simply that people are dying, it’s that they have been dying for some time and nothing has been done about it. No significant changes have been made to policy. No minister has been held to account. Only a few weeks ago, the key architect was rewarded with a knighthood. We pretend this is somehow normal, that it’s just “one of those things”. It isn’t. We tell ourselves it could never happen in a country like ours. It can and it is.
It’s entirely possible for our society to create a safety net that protects us in hard times and ill health. The truth is we have simply chosen not to. The past decade has seen the deliberate dismantling of the British state’s support for disabled people as toxic rhetoric around “scroungers” has morphed into bona fide cabinet policy. The same benefits system that at its extreme leaves disabled and poor people to die is routinely making tens of thousands of others destitute or housebound. A few hours after the news broke of Graham’s inquest, an appeal court ruled that universal credit discriminated against disabled people. That the government forced a terminally ill man through a protracted legal battle is a clue as to where we are now.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is said to be “currently undertaking a safeguarding review” after Graham’s death, as well they might. An independent inquiry into benefit-related deaths is long overdue, as are simple and humane measures to prevent them – from making it compulsory for officials to inform a vulnerable claimant’s next of kin or GP when they’re considering stopping benefits, to exempting them from being put through stressful and largely unnecessary retesting in the first place. The current strategy of expecting severely ill people to behave as if they were healthy in order to be allowed sickness benefits is a particularly cruel game.
But practical measures will never come without a culture shift, and it is not only the DWP’s culture that requires it. Politically, Britain has not reconciled itself with the “anti-welfare” agenda that is making this suffering possible. Severely disabled people will keep dying until we accept that the life of a benefit claimant is worth more than £73 a week.
Errol Graham was a grandfather. When he was young, he was a keen amateur footballer. A photo of his smiling face surrounded by his trophies that once marked the joyful moments of his life is now being used in stories about his death. If now is not the time to treat this as a national scandal, then when?
• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
