Malcolm Burge wrote to his local council last year telling them he was “depressed, stressed and suicidal”. The 66-year-old retired gardener had had his housing benefit cut by 50% but a backlog at Newham council meant he had unknowingly continued to receive the higher amount.

The council issued him a demand for £809.79. “I have no savings or assets,” Burge told them in one of several letters asking for help. “I am not trying to live, I am trying to survive.” On 27 June 2014, he drove to Cheddar Gorge in Somerset and set his car on fire.

It is difficult to find the words to describe how horrific each part of that is, whether the nature of Burge’s death or that he spent his final weeks afraid, begging for help, and knowing that no one in authority cared. The coroner, who last week ruled his death as suicide, perhaps put it as best as anyone can: “Mr Burge had obviously been caught up in the change of the government benefits system.”

He is not the only one. I wrote for the Guardian last year about David Clapson, a diabetic who died after he had his benefits sanctioned.

He couldn’t afford the electricity card to keep the fridge with his insulin in working and was found with CVs next to his body.

There are many other Malcolms and Davids – who had their benefits cut or stopped and then died, faceless, behind closed doors – but most of their names don’t make the papers. Most were disabled or chronically ill.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) admits it has carried out 49 “peer reviews” following the death of people receiving benefits, since February 2012. A peer review, according to government internal guidance, is triggered when suicide or alleged suicide is “associated with a DWP activity”.

We know these reviews have taken place, not because the government has willingly offered the information, but because journalists at the Disability News Service put in a freedom of information request.

Disabled People Against Cuts stress to me that the DWP figure of 49 is likely to be “a gross under-representation of the true numbers”. Strangely enough, the DWP told the Guardian on Monday it still had no plans to publish its investigations.

It apparently takes more than a few of its citizens killing themselves on their watch to worry this government. Esther McVey, the employment minister, has declared publicly “we followed all of our processes correctly”, despite the fact campaigners report “serious failings” in how DWP staff are following safeguards when sanctioning vulnerable people’s benefits, whether that’s contacting the claimant’s social worker or psychiatric nurse, or that no such safeguards even exist for people on jobseeker’s allowance.

There can be no doubt at this point that the process of giving out benefits in this country has rotted. Listening to evidence from the work and pensions select committee inquiry into sanctions has been like witnessing a parade of sadism: stories of jobcentre staff pressured to “trip up” vulnerable jobseekers; the tale of a pregnant women, with mental illness, forced to walk two miles to a foodbank because her benefits had been removed and she hadn’t eaten a cooked meal in a fortnight.

From central government to local councils, no one can say they didn’t see this coming. As far back as 2012, jobcentre bosses warned of the risk of suicides among benefit claimants forced to endure the coalition’s “reforms”. See that people are already struggling, and make the decision to push them, and it is entirely obvious that some will start falling.

Forget morality (we appear to have done so already, anyway), publishing investigations into these deaths – both as individual cases and as a whole – is a matter of basic transparency of power.

“I think you’re inflaming this,” McVey told the sanction inquiry last week when challenged on benefit claimants’ deaths. I wonder when exactly we are permitted to start making a fuss, what the tipping point is for at least 49 people to be treated as more than just numbers on austerity’s spreadsheet.

I suppose it is excessive to expect a responsible, or basic human reaction to these deaths from our elected officials. But then we are only dealing with benefit claimants, aren’t we? This government could never deem their suffering a national scandal. To care about someone’s death, you have to first believe their life mattered.

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 90 90 90 or via email: jo@samaritans.org