The DWP is trying to keep the details of the responses to the Modernising Support Green Paper, which proposed radical changes to PIP, secret. They have blocked a Freedom of Information request by Benefits and Work for access to documents which give a breakdown of the responses they received.
Readers may recall that when Labour won the election on 4 July, contrary to many people’s expectations, they left the green paper survey open for responses until it’s official closing date on 22 July
On 25 July, Baroness Sherlock, the DWP minister in the House of Lords stated that:
“We will be engaging with the responses people have made to the previous government's consultation on Personal Independence Payment, which closed on Monday 22 July.
“We want to thank the many people who invested their time in responding.
On 29 July Stephen Timms, the DWP minister for disability said:
“The consultation on the Modernising Support Green Paper closed on Monday 22 July. Over 16,000 responses have been received and we will review these responses.
“The proposals in this Green Paper were developed by the previous government. We will be considering our own approach to social security in due course.”
On 16 September, Timms revealed that “Whilst engaging with responses, I can confirm that responses to the set of proposals on the reform of Personal Independence Payments was mixed and for some proposals consistently negative.”
But on 14 October Timms suddenly announced that: “We do not intend to publish a response to the previous Government’s consultation.”
However, whilst the government can choose not to respond to the green paper, that does not prevent it publishing a summary of the replies it received, even if only out of respect for all those who took the time and trouble to give their views. As Timms said:
“The Department received over 16,000 responses to the consultation. This demonstrates the depth of feeling about the previous Government’s proposals. I thank the British public, as well as the numerous charities and organisations who responded on behalf of their members, for the time and effort taken to share their thoughts and views.”
So Benefits and Work made a Freedom of Information request for “any documents relating to an analysis, breakdown or other summary of the responses received to this consultation”.
But our request has been refused on the grounds of “a lack of clarity”.
The DWP could have claimed that there are so many breakdowns and summaries of the green paper that it would exceed the cost limit to find them all, so we must narrow down our request. But they didn’t do that, suggesting that there are not a large number of documents.
Nor did they try to argue that the documents are exempt, because they relate to “the formulation or development of government policy”. Though this would be a hard argument to make, given that Labour have stated that the proposals in the green paper were not theirs and they will be developing their own.
So, instead they have fallen back on claims of a lack of clarity, arguing:
“We are unable to deal with your FoI request without clarification of the information you seek. The reason for this is due to a lack of clarity about the terms analysis, breakdown and summary.
“Under Section 16 of the FoI Act we should assist you in helping you focus your request. To help us do so, we would like to know what is meant by analysis, breakdown and summary. For example, you may wish to provide the type of analysis you are requesting, e.g a table of the numerical breakdown of the responses made by post or online.”
But, as we have no knowledge of what sort of analysis, breakdown or other summary might have been created by the DWP it is not reasonable or, we think, lawful for the DWP to insist that we must detail what specific type we wish to see.
When he was in opposition, Stephen Timms was an outspoken critic of what he considered to be the DWP’s damaging obsession with secrecy. In government, he appears to have had a sudden and comprehensive conversion to tightly drawn curtains.
We have challenged the DWP’s refusal and we will keep readers informed.
This article was edited on 11.11.24 to remove speculation about the DWP's motives for its secrecy
