Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment for claimants, for DWP or for Atos Healthcare". In November 2016, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities published its report on the situation facing disabled people in the United Kingdom. Of the WCA, it said: In 2015, Iain Duncan Smith complained that the system gave doctors a "binary choice", not an opportunity to deliver a more nuanced opinion on claimants' fitness for work. In April 2016, the new Welfare Secretary, Stephen Crabb, said that the WCA had "never worked as intended. The WCA was a mess, it didn't recognise mental health issues and other types
Work Capability Assessment you can't do"; to take into account new disability legislation, changes in the workplace and developments in occupational health; to make the test more stringent; to assess most new claims in person rather than on paper; and, once the new test had bedded in, to use it to re-evaluate virtually every established sickness benefit recipient. To facilitate these last two objectives testing capacity was increased fivefold by employing nurses and physiotherapists to work alongside doctors, and a semi-structured interview technique based on a computer-generated template was used for the first time. Initially, only fresh claims for ESA were assessed, but