The DWP has carried out more than 175 secret reviews into the deaths of claimants since February 2012, with 80 happening in the last three full calendar years. But they have already begun destroying the evidence, with reviews from before 2016 all deleted.
The figures were revealed by the Disability News Service, following a series of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.
There were 22 reviews into deaths last year, and 40 in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic hit.
In all there were 126 reviews in the five years between 2016 and 2020 and 49 are known about between 2012 and autumn 2014 because of a previous FoI request.
The DWP say that they do not know how many reviews took place in the whole of 2014 and 2015 because they have destroyed the records.
