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 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