Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment for claimants, for DWP or for Atos Healthcare". In November 2016, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities published its report on the situation facing disabled people in the United Kingdom. Of the WCA, it said: In 2015, Iain Duncan Smith complained that the system gave doctors a "binary choice", not an opportunity to deliver a more nuanced opinion on claimants' fitness for work. In April 2016, the new Welfare Secretary, Stephen Crabb, said that the WCA had "never worked as intended. The WCA was a mess, it didn't recognise mental health issues and other types
Incapacity Benefit savings for the Treasury. Professor Jonathan Portes, formerly the chief economist at the DWP and later the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, has described the Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme as "the biggest single social policy failure of the last fifteen years". Incapacity Benefit Incapacity Benefit is a British social security benefit that was introduced in 1995 in an attempt to control the rising number of people on out-of-work sickness benefits. In 2008, the government began to phase it out by making it unavailable to new claimants. Between 2011 and 2016 a compulsory reassessment programme moved