Widower of disabled woman in bitter, years-long legal battle after DWP denied him benefits

Daniel Jwanczuk took the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to court in 2022, two years after his wife Suzzi died. He sat through discussions of his late wife’s lifelong disabilities. At the end, the single High Court judge ruled in his favour. It looked like victory.

Then, in 2023, the DWP appealed the High Court’s decision. Again, Daniel felt it was important to show up, to show the human side of what the government were fighting. This time, it was three judges in the Court of Appeal. He won, all three judges agreeing with him and dismissing the government’s appeal.

This March, Daniel found himself in the Supreme Court. The DWP had appealed again, not accepting the loss. Now he must wait months to discover if, finally, he will emerge from a struggle which has dominated the past half-decade of his life.

“I had to sit in front of five judges last week, listening to a barrister that didn’t know Suzzi, arguing against me. And it’s painful,” he says.

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At the heart of the dispute is £4,300. When Suzzi died, Daniel was denied bereavement support payments (BSP), on the grounds that Suzzi had not worked and therefore not met the National Insurance threshold which would have qualified Daniel for the benefit, under what’s known as the “contribution condition”.

The denial sparked the widower’s David-and-Goliath fight against the government. But despite two successive courts agreeing the denial of BSP breached Daniel’s human rights, he and his lawyers are still in the dark about why the DWP will not let the fight go.

“My mental health over the last few years has not been helped by all this,” he says. “The sleepless nights, the never-ending question, why? I don’t know the answer. That’s something I would love for them to answer.”

‘She was the most kind-hearted, generous woman’

“Anyone that ever met Suzzi instantly fell in love with her. She was the most kind-hearted, generous woman that I have ever met,” Daniel recalls. He and Suzzi had known each other since they met in nursery school in 1980, and remained friends all through their education. In 1995, they got together. Suzzi lived with ullrich muscular dystrophy, a rare muscle condition, and could walk around indoors with the aid of a stick. Doctors told her she would live a life of limitations, but she refused these constraints – although was never able to work. “She was always told use it or lose it with her muscles,” says Daniel. A bad fall in 1996 left Suzzi in plaster for six months and ultimately confined her to a wheelchair.

Daniel, a severe asthmatic, has received disability benefits his whole life and wasn’t working at this point. Suzzi needed everything doing for her. “Since 1996 I was helping in the bathroom, carrying her from the living room to the bedroom to the bathroom, cooking, cleaning, all domestic duties,” says Daniel. He became her paid carer, employed by the company providing the care.

Suzzi was, says Daniel, ferociously independent in spirit. If she was going down the street in her wheelchair and somebody asked for money, she’d go to Burger King and buy them a meal. “She had a look that would scare the devil. Because of her own experiences in life, she fought and argued for everybody else. She was never someone to see an injustice and not speak up,” she says.

Just before Suzzi died in a hospice in November 2020, she made Daniel promise to continue with life. When her death came, the pandemic had gripped the country, and everybody was in bubbles. “I was on my own in an empty house with no one to talk to,” Daniel says. Because he had been employed as Suzzi’s carer, Daniel also lost his income.

“I was on food parcels. I was down getting help from anyone that I could, which was extremely demoralising”, he says. Daniel applied for BSP. It would have provided him with an initial payment of £2,500, then £100 a month for 18 months, a total of £4,300. “It would have given me a bit of support when I needed it the most,” he says.

When the rejection came, he didn’t understand. Because Suzzi had never worked, she did not meet the threshold for National Insurance contributions (NICs) – the contribution condition – needed for Daniel to qualify.

“I thought I’d filled the form in incorrectly somehow, because I couldn’t see how an injustice like this,” Daniel says. “I don’t understand, she’s paid National Insurance credits on the benefits that she’s on, she would have got a pension if she had lived to pension age. And I just didn’t understand. I was at a very traumatic time and it just didn’t feel right.”

‘From day one, it was about the principle’

Bereavement support payments are not means-tested, and instead are available to those whose partner was under the state pension age and either died because of their work or paid a certain amount of NICs.

The contribution condition underpins a range of benefits in the UK. These include the state pension, the new-style jobseeker’s and employment and support allowances, and maternity allowance. The planned new unemployment insurance, announced as part of the Labour government’s welfare reforms, will also follow this principle. Others, like child benefit or universal credit, do not follow the contribution condition.

In Suzzi’s case, qualifying would have meant paying NICs in a single year, and only on the basis of about £3,000. Unlike the state pension, National Insurance credits like those Suzzi paid on her benefits did not count – the government requires the contributions to have been “actually paid”.

But Daniel and his lawyers do not know exactly why the DWP is so determined to fight the case as far as it can. “We can speculate but I don’t know the reasons why. It does seem disproportionate, but they’re the only ones that can really answer why they’ve fought this so far,” says Matthew Court, one of Daniel’s lawyers at the Public Law Project. When asked by Big Issue, the DWP said it could not comment on live litigation, but Big Issue understands it is pursuing the case to protect the contributory principle.

Some clues have emerged during court proceedings. When BSP was being formulated by the Conservative government ahead of the Pensions Act 2014, civil servants warned Lord Freud, the minister for welfare reform, that concerns had been raised that the rules could exclude partners of those who had been prevented by disability from ever working – exactly the position Daniel found himself in after Suzzi’s death. But they recommended the government not make an exception, telling Freud: “While this would improve access to the benefit, this would significantly undermine the contributory principle and would be inconsistent with the government agenda of making work pay.” Freud accepted their recommendation. A Northern Irish judge later ruled “there was no justification at the time of the failure to make an exception for this category of disabled person”.

After bringing his judicial review, Daniel won at the High Court in September 2022. The judge ruled that the condition breached article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, interfering with his right to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions, and that it was unlawful to deny surviving families BSP because a life-long disability had prevented somebody from working. The DWP then appealed, but in October 2023, the Court of Appeal dismissed this attempt. In the unsuccessful appeal, the government argued that allowing an exception to the contribution condition would cause more harm than the “discriminatory impact on the class affected by it”.

Should Daniel prevail at the Supreme Court, his lawyers do not expect it will open the floodgates on bereavement payments, with just a “small number of people” expected to benefit.

“From day one, it was more about the principle and the injustice than about the money. The money would have been nice about the time, and no one’s going to turn down a little bit of money when it’s needed the most,” says Daniel. “But it’s never, ever been about the money. It’s always been about something that’s wrong.”

Daniel remains puzzled why the DWP has put so much time and resource into fighting the case. “It just surprises me that they’re willing to spend so much money fighting me in this case, when the amount of bereavement support payment is a tiny drop in the world’s oceans, as far as finances are concerned, with the finances that they have,” he says. 

It is not the first time the DWP has been criticised recently for spending taxpayer cash in an attempt to defend its denial of benefits. In February, it emerged the government had spent almost half a million pounds unsuccessfully defending an “unlawful” consultation into billion-pound benefits cuts. Ellen Clifford, the disability campaigner who brought the case, said it showed “a government hell-bent on depriving disabled people of income support we need to survive, knowingly pushing hundreds of thousands of the poorest and most disadvantaged in society into deeper poverty and hopelessness with no escape.”

In 2023, Big Issue reported that the department spends tens of millions of pounds each year fighting disabled people appealing benefits decisions, with the majority of these cases ending up in favour of the claimant.

A victory would bring Daniel justice – but also something wider. “I want all disabled individuals who were unable to work due to their severe disabilities to be recognised in death. Suzzi was a wonderful person who contributed much to my life and the lives of others. She and I shouldn’t be treated any differently just because she had medical conditions that meant she was unable to work throughout her life,” he says.

“It has made my grief continue, with me feeling like I can’t mentally lay her to rest.”

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