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 Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said the test, which her party had described as "tough but fair" in its 2010 manifesto, had been "discredited" by the coalition government. In February 2018 Kent University academic Ben Geiger, who has made international comparisons of the WCA and who was also a policy advisor to the DWP in 2015 and 2016, described the WCA as having been "a failure by almost any criteria". He explained that "there is no transparent evidence that the WCA captures the demands of work in Britain today" and said the test was "perhaps the greatest