06/01/2011

Health professionals who are using a controversial new test to assess disabled people for out-of-work disability benefits believe the threshold for claiming the payments has been raised too high, according to new government-funded research.

Doctors and other healthcare professionals said the threshold for claiming benefits through the work capability assessment (WCA) had ‘risen significantly’ compared with the previous test, the personal capability assessment (PCA).

The WCA was introduced in 2008 to test eligibility for employment and support allowance (ESA), the replacement for incapacity benefit (IB).

But healthcare staff who work for the private company Atos Healthcare and had previously assessed people for IB ‘recognised that the WCA was intentionally stricter than the [PCA] and that the threshold for benefit eligibility has risen significantly’.

Some believed the WCA had gone ‘too far the other way’, according to the report, which was carried out by the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Other Atos staff mentioned cases ‘where they felt that the claimant was not in a position to work and would have benefited from a period on ESA’ but did not score highly enough to reach the WCA threshold.

Some of the healthcare professionals also said that people with fluctuating conditions, such as mild to moderate depression and MS, as well as those recovering from cancer, found it difficult to “score above the threshold”.

The report’s publication comes less than a month after an independent review by Professor Malcolm Harrington concluded that the government must improve ‘every stage’ of the WCA. Many ESA claimants told the researchers that they were not happy with how their WCA was carried out, with some claiming they were not listened to or believed. Others said the assessment ‘felt very rushed’ and that the questions they had been asked by the Atos healthcare professional ‘were not sensitive enough to mental health conditions and other fluctuating or chronic conditions’.

This article draws on information from www.disabilitynewsservice.com