What on God's green earth is going on here? Never has the 'elephant in the room' metaphor been more apt.
As well as Dr Litchfield's review, on the 12th of December the DWP published a separate report on the performance of the WCA as an offshoot of Prof Harrington's work on the matter. The DWP described it as "a study to examine the assessment criteria for Employment and Support Allowance...[that] looks at the validity and reliability of the assessment criteria" while the review's own summary said it was "a study to examine the performance of the instrument used to assess entitlement to Employment and Support Allowance" and was a "systematic Evidence Based Review (EBR)...to examine the validity and consistency of the WCA". Indeed, Dr Litchfield's own review of the WCA for Parliament lamented the unavailability of this Evidence-Based Review at the time he was compiling his report (the EBR publication date had been inexplicably delayed from the summer).
Given all the noise about the descriptors and their interpretation, this would have been a golden opportunity for the DWP to firmly rebut any suggestion that Atos HCPs had been wrongly interpreting the criteria used in assessing work capability...wouldn't it?
Well, if it was such an opportunity, the DWP didn't take it. Instead, we were given a comparison of the WCA with an alternative method of assessment - all well and good in itself, but hardly what the DWP suggested the EBR was all about.
So when it comes to questions of whether -
- Walking from room to room equates to covering 200 metres
- A human hand can reliably pick up a coin or write with a pen using just one finger
- Washing and dressing require the same amount of concentration as being able to function safely and reliably in a workplace
- Or being found fit for work and losing ESA might, in itself, exacerbate some common mental problems
As Alice said in Wonderland: curiouser and curiouser...
WCA: an evidence-based review
The Litchfield review
