The minister for employment,
Chris Grayling, has been accused of trying to censor a Ministry of Justice courts service information video which sought to help and advise those appealing against decisions to have their
disability and sickness benefit taken away.
A string of emails and letters between Grayling and Ministry of Justice civil servants, seen by the Guardian, appear to show that the minister for employment wanted to remove parts of the educational video produced by Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service which gave advice on how be to more successful during the appeals process. Emails sent from the minister's account complain about the video's "tone" and "negative comments" towards the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) even though the sections in dispute were agreed to be factually true.
The censorship allegations come after Channel Four's
Dispatches programme on Monday alleged that Atos, the firm involved in medically assessing sickness and
disability claims, had developed
a target culture to ensure enough people were being taken off benefits.
BBC's Panorama, also aired on Monday, further questioned Atos's assessment procedures and found one case where a man died of his serious heart condition just five weeks after the company found him fit to work for the second time.
Hundreds of thousands have
appealed against benefit decisions in the past few years and, according to the latest figures, about 30% are successful.
The courts service video, which tells claimants to appear in person if they want to be twice as likely to win their appeal, remains offline and the
MoJ appears to have instructed YouTube to pull down all illicitly posted copies because of copyright infringement.
Complaining about the tone of the video,
an email was sent from Grayling's official ministerial account to MoJ officials on 19 March saying: "A couple of times it's noted that a claimant is twice as likely to win their appeal if they turn up in person – again this is broadly true, but doesn't help to reduce the opinion that it isn't the facts of the case that are important, but the turning up in front of a tribunal and pleading their case."
...
A further email from Grayling's office reads: "I think for the moment we should wait to see what comments they [Ministry of Justice officials] come back with … it may be that we feel the whole tone of the video is wrong and could not be fixed."
After the list of complaints from Grayling's office was sent to the Ministry of Justice, the department's parliamentary under-secretary, Jonathan Djanogly,
wrote in a letter dated 5 April that he would instruct his officials to remove certain sections of the film even though the statements were not factually in dispute and would run a copy of the future script of the courts service video past DWP staff.
When later asked in
a parliamentary question on 10 July by the former Labour Treasury minister Stephen Timms why his department had sought to remove the video, Grayling replied: "The department did not direct that the Ministry of Justice video about employment and support allowance appeals be removed from the website YouTube.
"We sought to correct factual inaccuracies within the video which we brought to the attention of MoJ officials who agreed to revise the content of the video."
