Report poses crucial questions for Labour government on whether to scrap work capability assessment

A new report on the work capability assessment (WCA) has posed crucial questions for the new government on whether to scrap the test or improve it, just four days after Labour came to power in a landslide election victory.

The Conservative government announced last year that it would scrap the WCA after the election, and would tighten the assessment in the short term as a cost-cutting measure.

But Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger has this week published a report on the “much-hated system”, weighing up the possible advantages and disadvantages of scrapping the WCA.

The final report draws on input from scores of experts who examined his initial conclusions, including disabled people with lived experience of the social security system.

The report, After the WCA: Competing Visions of Disability and Welfare, concludes that both scrapping the WCA and reforming it could each lead to a “much better” system.

Baumberg Geiger, co-lead on the work, welfare reform and mental health programme for the ESRC* Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London, is now hoping to ensure the report is seen by Labour’s new ministers in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The Conservative government said last year that it planned to scrap the WCA and rely instead on the personal independence payment (PIP) assessment to decide if disabled claimants are eligible for extra support through universal credit.

Under that system, decisions on whether disabled people are expected to carry out work-related activity would be made by jobcentre work coaches.

This week’s report aims to sketch out possible best- and worst-case scenarios if the WCA was scrapped.

It shows that increasing spending on disability benefit spending “does not mean that ‘welfare spending is out-of-control’” but is instead a result of a much larger drop in spending on other benefits, such as universal credit.

The report also calls for a substantial increase in the basic rate of universal credit, to address widespread poverty among both disabled and non-disabled people.

Baumberg Geiger lays out some ideas for improving the WCA, such as finding a way to match people’s “functional” capacity with the requirements of those jobs that are available, but also ensuring that assessors “accurately report” what they are told by claimants, improving safeguards for cases where assessors challenge claimants’ descriptions of their lives, and improving how medical evidence is fed into the WCA process.

He concludes that the WCA is “not quite as bad as it was in the early 2010s” but is “still associated with much claimant unhappiness and anxiety, is about to get harsher, and it remains a poor assessment”.

The worst-case scenario of scrapping it could see “much greater income losses for ill and disabled people”, with the possibility that extending strict conditions and sanctions to more disabled people could be “a disaster” and might even increase disincentives to work.

But he also describes a “best-case scenario” in which the current regime is replaced by a focus by DWP on “engagement not compliance”; on “voluntary aspirations, rather than mandatory commitments”; and on “genuinely useful steps towards work, rather than jumping through hoops” and “threats”.

He says the system “needs claimants to trust the DWP”, which is “the most obvious lesson from the last fifteen years”, as “many ill and disabled claimants have little trust in the DWP, feel insecure, and negotiate work and benefits with trepidation”.

He writes in his report: “The current system for disabled people does not incentivise work; it does not consistently protect people from poverty or destitution; it does not provide administrative justice; and it creates insecurity and anxiety for many ill and disabled claimants.”

He concludes that the decision on whether to scrap the WCA or reform it is less important than “the broader challenge of building a system that works for ill and disabled people more broadly”.

Among the disabled campaigners who fed into the final report, Kaliya Franklin, who was a leading member of the grassroots Spartacus Network in the post-2010 years, and spent years researching the flawed WCA, said there needed to be a greater focus on increasing the level of benefits to avoid people living in “long term destitution”.

She said there needed to be much more emphasis on what employers can do to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people and support them in the workplace.

Bill Scott, senior policy advisor for Inclusion Scotland, said the question of the “adequacy” of benefit levels has to be “tackled absolutely fundamentally”.

He said: “If we want to see where the epidemic of mental health issues has come from, look at the adequacy of benefits, and look at austerity policies and the poverty it’s created in our society, and the anxiety that creates within the poorer parts of the population – and you have an explanation for the huge rise in mental health issues amongst working-age people.”

Catherine Hale, consultant researcher at King’s College London and founder of Chronic Illness Inclusion, pointed to a number of “injustices” in the WCA and the PIP assessment for people with chronic illness or energy-limiting conditions.

These include the “denial of cognitive fatigue and dysfunction” and its impact on work capability and employability; the “flawed rationale” in the WCA that takes more account of a single “severe” impairment than multiple fluctuating impairments when it comes to assessing capacity for work; and the failure of the PIP assessment to account for the needs and extra costs of people with chronic illness.

*Economic and Social Research Council

Picture: (From left to right) Catherine Hale, Ben Baumberg Geiger and Bill Scott

A note from the editor:

Please consider making a voluntary financial contribution to support the work of DNS and allow it to continue producing independent, carefully-researched news stories that focus on the lives and rights of disabled people and their user-led organisations.

Please do not contribute if you cannot afford to do so, and please note that DNS is not a charity. It is run and owned by disabled journalist John Pring and has been from its launch in April 2009.

Thank you for anything you can do to support the work of DNS…