Joy Dove pops into town on most mornings. Clutching a small handbag in the early light, she flashes her older person’s pass and sits peacefully as the bus weaves its way to the small Teesside town of Stockton.
But one point of the route haunts her. It’s where she passes the flat of her daughter Jodey Whiting.
“I can’t help it, every day I have to look up and she’s looking down,” her voice cracks. There’s a short silence before she says: “I’ve got all upset, it takes a lot for me to cry. It’ll never be the same.”
Days after her benefits were stripped, Jodey, 42, was found dead in her home, surrounded by farewell notes to her nine children.
Her grieving mother is now fighting to take the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to court. The reason is devastatingly simple, she says: “I blame the DWP for my daughter’s death.”
Jodey’s death preceded the troubled rollout of Universal Credit, the government’s crisis-hit benefits scheme.
Under the scheme, claimants are paid in one monthly payments, rather than weekly or fortnightly. Universal Credit replaces housing benefit, child tax credit, income support, working tax credit, jobseeker’s allowance, and employment and support allowance.
A study in Gateshead last year said stress over Universal Credit was pushing some claimants to consider suicide and labelled the policy a “serious threat to public health”.
Joy now wants her daughter’s legacy to see a “massive shake up” of the current system. “Universal Credit is ridiculous and, if anything, I want it changed in my daughter’s name,” she told HuffPost UK.
“All I can think about is I’ve buried my daughter in a hole in the ground and she shouldn’t be there, she loved her kids, you shouldn’t be there Jodey.”
“She cried and said ‘mam what am I going to do I can’t walk out the door I can’t breathe'.”
Jodey took 23 tablets a day to ease the agony brought by a curvature to the spine and a brain cyst. She was in hospital with pneumonia in Christmas 2016, and missed one health review.
The former shop assistant’s family say she was unaware the appointment even existed, but in February a letter arrived from the DWP telling Jodey her Employment Support Allowance was to be taken away.
Joy claims no job centre official met her daughter, likening it to “someone’s fate being decided behind closed doors.”
As impending council tax and rent bills mounted up, “she cried and said ‘mam what am I going to do I can’t walk out the door I can’t breathe’,” Joy said.
Despite attempts to challenge it, the benefits decision was final. “Jodey said ‘I’m going to go to sleep now I love you mam’.” Those were her final words.
Joy knew something wasn’t right the next morning. “We took the key, walked in the passage and just saw her there. We just started screaming and Jodey’s girls all started screaming.”
That day will never leave Joy’s mind; a day when 10 children lost a grandma, nine children lost a mother, and she lost her “best friend”.
“No mother should have to go through that vision, which is with me every day through the DWP’s failings,” she said.
An Independent Case Examiner found “multiple failings” by the DWP, including officials ignoring their own safeguarding guidelines that could have saved Jodey, and the repeated lack of apology to the family.
“They sent out a letter saying ‘you’re fit to work’ while my daughter was in the undertakers,” Joy said. “It was disgusting.”
The report also ruled that the “blunt and insensitive” DWP apologise to Jodey’s family and pay them £10,000 compensation.
Joy calls it “blood money,” not compensation. “It sickened me,” she said. “They tried to get away with it but they didn’t offer it. What’s the cost of my daughter’s life?”
She believes the failings that cost Jodey’s life remain structural in Universal Credit, after numerous accounts have emerged of disabled claimants like Jodey being driven to destitution. “It’s frightening for everyone, it needs changed,” she said.
“It’s heartbreaking, all these people that need this support from the government and they’re getting treated like rubbish. It’s such a waste of life.”
Joy’s fight is snowballing by the day, with eight families gathering around a Justice for Jodey petition on the parliament website, signed by nearly 37,000 people since March.
The petition demands that the “institutionally disablist” DWP face an independent inquiry over deaths linked to benefits and any evidence of misconduct by officials be presented to the police.
Among the signatories is filmmaker Ken Loach, who phoned Joy in early April to express his “disgust” at her case, Joy said. She also said the filmmaker believes that things have deteriorated since his film I, Daniel Blake.
Joy handed two years’ worth of job centre correspondence and medical evidence to solicitors on 26 April, in the hope she will be granted legal aid to advance her case. She expects to have a result as early as this week. If she fails, she says she will rely on crowdfunding to pay for a lawyer.
The DWP responded to the petition on April 8 insisting it had “apologised unreservedly for the failings in the case of Ms Whiting” but that it “has no plans to hold an inquiry into the deaths of claimants.”
“I want it for the people, I want it for Jodey’s poor kids,” Joy said of her campaign. “They’re older now and I get them saying you sound like mam and look like mam there. They’re coping with it in their own way but it’s horrible.
“The DWP who were supposed to care for her and they did not.
“I want to frighten [the DWP] and to give them the heartache that I’ve had for two years, the heartache that’ll never go away.”
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