Introduction

The Deaths by Welfare Project, at Healing Justice Ldn, investigates the deaths of disabled people linked to welfare reform and welfare state violence. At the heart of our work is the Deaths by Welfare timeline. 

Since 2021, the timeline has collected together evidence showing how the welfare system creates life-threatening policies that lead to people’s deaths. 

We show that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and their contractors, know about these deaths and yet continue to deny responsibility or to make systemic change. 

The timeline is based on over a decade of research and involvement in disabled people’s anti-austerity campaigning. The need for the timeline and its contents is deeply informed by disabled people’s expertise, knowledge, activism, and movements. 

We hope the timeline will be a tool for disability justice movement organising, to build cross disability and cross movement solidarity, and to create life-affirming systems, with disabled people, and the analysis developed through lived experience, at the heart.

Content Warning

Please read this in full before accessing the timeline. It explains our work and contains an important warning about the distressing nature of the content of the timeline. 

We are creating and building this work while doing it and being in it. Everything about the project is distressing and so we’ve been intentional in creating processes for supporting people to engage – co-designed and informed by the expertise of people with lived experience.

• The content of the timeline is devastating and enraging. 
• The timeline is triggering for different people in different ways, especially depending on how folks are positioned in relation to the welfare system, their experiences of cumulative harm, trauma, and distress. 
• The timeline contains a lot of information about welfare reform related deaths, including suicides.
• It does not contain any specific details about the methods of people’s suicides. 
• We understand welfare reform deaths and suicides by talking about them in the context of injustice and harm in which they take place.
• We are still learning about how to talk about the brutalities of the system, without reproducing these harms. 
• We recognise that resistance against welfare reform and campaigning for justice for those who have died takes many different forms, and we honour these differences.
• We recognise there is a balance in working with compassion and care and also not undermining or infantilising people who live the realities that our work documents and tries to transform. 
• We want to honour the legitimacy of your self-knowledge (that you know yourself best) while also understanding how the violence of the system shows up in so many ways (in our bodies, and our emotions) both every day and sometimes unexpectedly. We would like you to engage with the timeline in a way that honours how you’re feeling and that prioritises care. Please do what’s right for you at this time.