Consultation outcome

Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (Z2K) response

Updated 23 March 2020

Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (Z2K) is an anti-poverty charity that uses casework to work with people to prevent homelessness and support people to access the Social Security benefits they are entitled to. We use evidence from this work to campaign for change. We welcome this call for evidence and hope the DWP will be persuaded to engage meaningfully and directly with disabled people in order to change the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policy and practice.

0.1 Did the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) request that they could speak with individuals and or groups of individuals from, or represented by your organisation, to provide evidence (i.e. interviews, focus groups, etc).

It is vital that the DWP meets regularly with disabled people, including individuals supported by smaller charities like Z2K and other grassroots organisations, to ensure that the experiences of disabled people are heard.

In several meetings we have had with civil servants and ministers, we have offered to host meetings that are attended by DWP civil servants and or ministers, and our clients. The response has primarily been that the DWP are already doing their own stakeholder engagement, or that the Ministers meet with their constituents regularly.

Whilst the DWP has recently requested to engage with people supported by our service, the offer has been for the DWP to moderate these sessions. Given the lack of trust many of our clients have in the DWP, we believe it would be more suitable for us to host this session, and we would also appreciate more detail on how our clients’ engagement with this session will influence DWP work.

0.2 Did the DWP provide any comments on the advice or feedback that they received from you?

Z2K staff attended a DWP Work Capability Assessment Reform Day as well as 6 meetings with DWP officials or Ministers in 2019. On each occasion, Z2K provided advice and feedback to the DWP, but we never received any follow-up comments or updates, nor feedback on whether what we have said has been put into practice via policy decision making.

0.3 Have you seen any tangible improvements to policies or practices for disabled people following your engagement with DWP? If so, could you set out what these are? If not, what were the tangible improvements that you expected to see?

We have not seen improvements to policies or practises for disabled people following our engagement with the DWP. For example, during a roundtable with Amber Rudd in 2019, Z2K’s CEO highlighted concerns with merging Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) into one combined assessment process. Others have raised these concerns but as announced on 02/03/2020, the DWP have continued with plans to roll out the process.

The DWP must work transparently and involve people with direct experience of claiming disability benefits to ensure policies like these will be implemented in a way which will improve people’s lives.

0.4 Following your engagement, did DWP give you the opportunity to comment on draft proposals before final decisions were taken?

No, however this would be extremely beneficial provided it was shared in an assessable and meaningful way including allowing for adequate response times to ensure people of all disabilities can respond. If we had that time, we could reach out to our clients

1. In your view, can the DWP’s process of engagement be improved and, if so, why and how?

It is our view that the DWP’s communication with disabled people should be improved considerably in order to achieve effective policy changes in an impactful way.

While we are able to recount the experiences of our clients at meetings with the DWP, engaging directly with disabled people is the most beneficial way of getting to the heart of the issues.

Both encouraging organisations to bring clients who have experience of the system to DWP meetings and allowing for organisations to host engagement sessions attended by the DWP would create a space where concerns can be conveyed in the most direct way possible.

Every time the DWP engages with disabled people or the organisations that represent them, the DWP should feedback on this engagement outlining how it will be incorporated into DWP work, and provide those who engaged with the opportunity to comment on this feedback.

Allowing disabled people to set the agenda when engaging in meetings with the DWP will ensure that the issues most affecting them will be raised.

All physical and virtual meetings and communications must be accessible and tailored to the disabled person’s needs.

It is crucial that meetings with officials or Ministers do not require that the disabled people engaging with the DWP give their personal details such as their National Insurance Number; there are legitimate fears within this community that engaging with the DWP could lead to a reduction or holt in their benefits. Is there anything else you wish to add about this subject?

We believe the most important thing is that the DWP engages directly with disabled people more. We would have liked to set up an engagement session with our clients, many of whom are disabled or seriously unwell, to feed into this response if this consultation deadline had provided us with the time to do so. In light of this, we hope the Social Security and Advisory Committee (SSAC) has received and meaningfully engages with responses from Disabled Led Organisations and disabled individuals themselves.

We would also call for direct engagement with all ESA and PIP claimants and ex-claimants during the Green Paper consultation.