Why is wca calling

Under section 10 of the Welfare Reform Act , five such independent reviews are required. Thus far, Professor Harrington has issued reports for years one and two in November and November respectively and at time of writing had issued a call for evidence for year three with the report scheduled for the end of the year.

Broadly speaking, the Harrington reviews have thus far largely recommended broad changes to the process and DWP culture, rather than substantial change to the activities and points in the assessment. Included among the topics for inclusion in the year three report are communications, face-to-face working and again the nature and qualify of decision making.

The year three independent review will be the last led by Professor Harrington. At time of writing, a replacement had not been appointed. The degree of success of the independent review process has proved a moot point. Professor Harrington has commented that based on his own liaison with the DWP, there has been some degree of success in changing decision-maker culture — ie, so that they have become more willing to question Atos medical reports and on occasion make a different decision than that indicated in the medical reports.

But disability charities and others have regularly reported that such success has been patchy at best, and now seems to be evaporating. That view has been substantiated by recent official research which shows that many decision makers now feel that their control over the decision is decreasing again, that the Atos report is still the main piece of evidence and that they only question around one in 40 of Atos reports.

The experience of the author of this article is that many welfare rights representatives nationally feel that telephony is often an unhelpful process, with claimants often experiencing the telephone calls merely as a justification of the forthcoming decision rather than as a helpful discussion.

The most obvious example of this is the wide-ranging changes to the descriptors in the WCA that were introduced on 28 March In brief, those changes made many changes to the descriptors that overall made the test more difficult to satisfy, but also introduced some modest expansion to exemptions and to support group membership, particularly with regard to claimants receiving chemotherapy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in the light of such change, recent statistics show that in new claims for employment and support allowance ESA some 45 per cent pass the WCA ie, a minority albeit a large one but that support group membership has expanded from around 10 per cent to 26 per cent.

There may be further such wide-ranging changes, and spring seems a likely time. However, tension has arisen here regarding the mental health descriptors, in particular between the Department and disability groups. The latter, including in their work with Professor Harrington, have been calling for a degree of change there which, up till now at least, the government has been unwilling to contemplate.

At time of writing, the government was committed to introducing some change in this field but not on the scale called for by the charities, which Minister Chris Grayling felt would change the assessment too much. In the meantime, more modest reform has continued, in the form of plans for further adjustment to the rules on support group membership — this time to include those receiving oral chemotherapy and radiology following work with Macmillan Cancer Support.

New rules will also remove the requirement that treatment must be continuous for a period of more than six months. The Department estimates that the change will mean an additional people per year being put in the support group. It says that it intends to implement the proposals by early In the meantime, public disquiet about the WCA has been growing. Complaints, about the harshness of test and the way is applied, have come not only from claimants and their representatives, but also from doctors and MPs.

Atos, the private and profit-making company awarded the contract by the then Labour government for carrying out assessments a contract extended by the current government , has been criticised by the National Audit Office NAO for not offering value for money and underperforming. Citizens Advice commented that ESA was the fastest growing advice issue in bureaux and that its own advisers estimated their success rate at appeal was around 80 per cent.

In a Westminster Hall debate in September, opposition MPs lined up to report the harsh experiences of constituents with the WCA, and called for fundamental change. As with the forerunner of the WCA the personal capability assessment, or PCA , caselaw from the Upper Tribunal and beyond is clarifying the meaning of individual descriptors in the assessment. Most of this does not have signif-icance for the future of the WCA as such. However, a forthcoming judicial review regarding people with mental health problems may have a more general impact.

The WCA — or rather, the process which it entails — is currently the subject of action before the courts regarding claimants with mental health problems. But if the Maximus healthcare professional decides there is no need to seek this further medical evidence, they will not need to justify that decision. This shows that DWP has disregarded the recommendation made more than four years ago by Professor Malcolm Harrington, who carried out the third independent review of the WCA on behalf of ministers.

There are also concerns that DWP never carried out the large-scale pilot, as it said it would, but only a feasibility study involving less than people, which led to further evidence being requested in just 11 more cases. It originally planned a pilot of 4, people, before reducing this to 1, people, and telling the tribunal that it first had to carry out a feasibility study before any pilot.

Four years later, another letter was sent to DWP by a coroner, raising the same concerns and making almost identical recommendations, this time following the death of a north London man. The deaths of other claimants have also been linked to the failure to ensure that further medical evidence was obtained, including those of Mark Wood , Paul Donnachie , David Barr , and a woman known only as Ms D E.

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