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,
Work Capability Assessment advised the government on back-to-work policy between 2006 and 2016. She said of the WCA: "I don't think anyone thinks it has been a success". Conversely, the DWP has said that a 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