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 and cognitive descriptors" but the DWP's own doctors were not convinced by the evidence presented. The department decided to set up an 'evidence-based review' to look in more detail at the proposed changes, which concluded that the existing criteria "produced consistent results on the whole" and that the WCA was already "an accurate indicator of work capability as compared with expert opinion". DWP ministers replaced Professor Harrington once he had submitted his third annual report in 2012. In 2013, "The Guardian" quoted Professor Harrington as saying: "I would have preferred to do a roll-out [the IB reassessment] in the second