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 welfare budget. In 2015 the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) found that no savings had been made to date: the sickness benefit budget remained at more than £13billion a year. Furthermore, because many more claimants than forecast were being placed in the Support Group, the government's fiscal watchdog "raised" its estimate for spending on sickness benefits by one billion pounds a year. In 2016 the OBR said that the reforms had still made no impact on the level of welfare spending — although a simple freezing of benefit payments, so that they did not rise with inflation, had made some