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,
Incapacity Benefit was nothing in the regulations that inherently trapped people on Incapacity Benefit: recipients were free to relinquish their payments and seek work if they felt able to, although the meagre gains from moving into a poorly paid and insecure job were thought to act as a deterrent to doing so - a phenomenon that Working Tax Credits and Universal Credit were designed to mitigate. In 2011, out-of-work sickness benefits had an annual cost of £13billion: the Chancellor, George Osborne, called this "a very large budget". The total annual budget of the Department for Work and Pensions in 2011 was £180