Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment the "written" guidance contained in the 255-page instruction manual issued to all assessors: The foreword to the WCA Handbook states: On 22 July 2013, the DWP announced that all Atos WCA assessors would be retrained, as part of a "quality improvement plan" that followed "a DWP audit which identified an unacceptable reduction in the quality of written reports produced following assessments." In 2006, the New Labour government set out its plans for welfare reform: over the course of a decade, it expected the deployment of the WCA to shrink the number of people on out-of-work sickness benefits by one million,
Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment that it was "an accurate indicator of work capability compared with expert opinion". Conversely, Kent University academic Ben Geiger has made international comparisons of the test: he found “no transparent evidence that the WCA captures the demands of work in Britain today". In practice, experience has shown that the WCA usually identifies these types of claims correctly: However, the process has largely struggled to categorise claims correctly if they fall between these two extremes, particularly where mental health is concerned. In fiscal terms, the deployment of the WCA was expected to more than halve the sickness benefit bill over the