The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has come under fire once again. This time, it’s around it giving civil servants bonuses of up to £14,000. However, the right-wing corporate media framing of the story isn’t quite right – because it was disabled people who suffered at the expense of civil servants. It wasn’t a case of DWP bonuses stealing older people’s winter fuel payments – which the likes of GB News claimed.
DWP: staff bonuses for making people’s lives a misery
In the 2023-24 fiscal year, the DWP gave out £645,685 in end-of-year bonuses to senior civil servants. Additionally, junior staff received a total of £11.2 million in performance-related bonuses. As the Telegraph reported:
This included 91 top-ranking officials who netted an average performance-related payment of £7,250, with the highest payout reaching £14,000…
Sir Peter Schofield KCB, the department’s permanent secretary, received performance-related pay of between £10,000 and £15,000 last year, in addition to a salary of between £195,000 and £200,000…
Some £11.2m in bonuses was paid to 82,526 junior DWP staff, with the average payment of £150 and the largest at £214…
The right-wing corporate media framed this as an outrage because of the Labour Party government’s decision to cut winter fuel payments for older people. GB News screamed that:
Outrage as DWP civil servants awarded bonuses of up to £14k while stripping pensioners of Winter Fuel Payment
This is not correct. The Labour Party government made the decision to cut winter fuel payments in July 2024. The DWP bonuses were for the year ending April 2024.
Of course, the right-wing corporate media are framing the story like this for political gain.
What the payments did coincide with were multiple other abuses of claimants by the DWP – including a damning UN report into its systemic human rights violations; further cuts to disabled people’s benefits, and leaving people on Universal Credit worse off than they were before.
Nothing new under the sun
Of course, the issue of the DWP giving staff bonuses while claimants are left in poverty is nothing new.
The Canary has consistently reported on the issue over the years. For example, the DWP paid out over £1m in bonuses in August 2022 alone – just as the then-government announced a real-terms cut to chronically ill, disabled, and non-working people’s benefits.
In response to the controversy, the DWP has stated that performance-related bonuses are standard practice across government departments, intended to reward staff for their contributions.
Of course, this will be cold comfort to the countless benefit claimants who have suffered thanks to toxic government policies. And it’s almost certain that the DWP will be handing out more bonuses next year – amid equal, if not worse, controversy, too.
Featured image via the Canary
