Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment group of experts — a professor of psychiatry, a consultant psychiatrist in learning disability, a professor of rheumatology, and an expert in human resources — reviewed the WCA in 2013 and concluded that "the WCA produced consistent results on the whole, and is an accurate indicator of work capability compared with expert opinion". But in the year that the study was published, the firms running back-to-work training for people on ESA said they had "ongoing concerns about the accuracy of the WCA". And in 2014, Atos announced that it had come to the conclusion that "the WCA is not working
Work Capability Assessment 'fit for work' by the DWP at the first stage of the decision-making process. The DWP then overturned a sizeable percentage of its own decisions at the reconsideration stage, while independent tribunals overturned still more. More recently, DWP data for the first quarter of 2016 showed that 9% of WCAs carried out at that point in time were reassessments of old Incapacity Benefit claims, while 21% were reassessments of successful ESA claims and the remaining 70% were new assessments of fresh claims. The outcomes, before any reconsiderations or appeals, were: A key recommendation from the first external review of the