He was part of the Mental Health Technical
Working Group commissioned by DWP in 2006, with, among others, Sue Godby from
the College of Occupational Therapists and Unum Provident, and Dr Angela Graham
from Atos Origin, to develop ‘proposals from transforming the Personal
Capability Assessment (the forerunner to the WCA), from an incapacity-based tool
for determining entitlment to Incapacity Benefit to a more positive assessment
incorporating assessment of capability and of health related interventions which
would contribute to overcoming health-related barriers preventing people with
disabilities from
engaging with work’.
With new emphasis on what disabled people were able to do rather than
on their limitations or on the social barriers they may encounter, the new test
was what effectively became the WCA, adopting the biopsychosocial model promoted
by Unum.
The new descriptors are a mirror image of the old ones, which
recognised that some actitives could not be performed at all by a disabled
person, while the new ones only recognise
different levels of ‘difficulties’ for the same activity.
But this new version of PCA also makes a clear break from the old one
as its intention is not only to explore disabled people’s residual functional
ability but also ‘their approach and attitude to returning to work’ which
is one of the main feature of the biopsychosocial model, which sees disability
or sickness as a ’state of mind’.
Ultimately there is a very clear conflict of interest:
Dr Paul Litchfield will have to assess the effectiveness of the
WCA, in particular ‘the way that mental health conditions are considered in
the WCA’ and to consider the ‘biopsychosocial factors that
influence capability for work’ as part of his review.
As part of the evidence one can speculate that he will certainly also
receive, like Dr Harrington, strong calls for the WCA to be scrapped.
And as Dr Harrington did, he will certainly respond that the
Independent Reviewer has not seen or heard any compelling arguments or
evidence that the whole system should be scrapped.
How could he not say that about the WCA? After all, he designed it.
See the following document which now only seems to exist on the
website WhyWaitforEver or as a hardcopy in the Parliament Deposited Papers: Transformation of the
Personal Capability Assessment
