Suicide Prevention Strategy

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

What the strategy is trying to do is to look at those high risk groups and the risk factors behind them. One of the biggest risk factors causing suicidal thoughts are financial difficulties, which of course out-of-work disability benefits come into. One of the highest groups in terms of priority are middle-aged men, who are often the people suffering in this space. There are other groups as well, such as children and young people, pregnant women, new mothers and autistic people. There is a range, and what we are trying to do in this strategy is hit those areas of highest risk. To put this into context, those people on all DWP benefits in the reviews done on suicide make up less than 1% of the population of suicides. What we are trying to do is hit the major risk groups.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, the suicide prevention strategy says that DWP staff will be trained to identify benefit claimants who express suicidal thoughts and escalate these appropriately. Can the Minister confirm that the DWP will collect data on out-of-work disability benefit claimants who are caught or flagged by the system, so that we can understand whether or not this new policy is as effective as we would all want it to be?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Yes, and I had the opportunity, because I used to be the lead NED at DWP, to go along to a number of jobcentres and see the sorts of work that they do. They have two things. They have an independent review of each of these, and those are the stats I was using: they get about 50 cases a year in these categories. Where there is a serious case they have a serious case review, independently chaired with a Permanent Secretary on it as well.