MPs have joined disability activists calling for a public inquiry into deaths linked to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell MP has tabled an early day motion urging the government to set up the probe.

It states: “That this House notes the shocking evidence published by John Pring in his recent book [on] the harm, too often leading to fatalities, inflicted on disabled people by the DWP since the introduction of the work capability assessment.”

It calls on the government to establish an independent public inquiry into the role played by ministers, civil servants and advisers and their culpability for the suffering identified in this research.

Labour’s Jon Trickett, Mary Kelly Foy and Ian Lavery; SDLP’s Claire Hanna; and DUP’s Jim Shannon have sponsored the motion. Labour MP Grahame Morris has also backed it.

John Pring is the editor of the Disability News Service (DNS), whose book, The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, details how the DWP spent more than a decade covering up evidence that links its actions with hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths of disabled social security claimants.

Mr McDonnell, a long-time disability rights campaigner, told a vigil outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday that it was difficult to describe the scale of the suffering caused by the work capability assessment (WCA), including “tragically, a large number of disabled people losing their lives.”

The vigil was held as the High Court heard disabled activist and author Ellen Clifford’s legal challenges to proposals by the last government to further restrict eligibility for WCA payments, which Labour says it will proceed with.