After the WCA: Competing Visions of Disability and Welfare [new report]
My new report looks at different scenarios of what might happen, so that we can clearly see what it takes to make incapacity benefit reform a success.
After several near misses, the era of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) may be coming to a close. In March 2023, the Conservative Government proposed that the WCA would be scrapped, replaced by a new system that relies instead on the assessment for disability-related extra costs within Personal Independence Payment (PIP). And with Labour’s manifesto having said that the WCA “needs to be reformed or replaced”, it is clear that something is going to change.
But exactly what comes next? And will it be better than the WCA? Or will we instead decide to replace the WCA with something similar? The concrete choices that the next Government face have not been made clear. In this briefing, I show both worst-case and best-case scenarios (and what a better WCA might look like), so that we can more clearly see how to make a reformed system a success.
The full report is available here, including the summary of a really valuable discussion with a variety of different types of experts on 6th June:
Or if you just want the executive summary extracted into a separate file, then that’s available here:
You can also find the full report on the website of the Centre for Society & Mental Health.
Finally, Figure 2 of the report shows trends in non-pensioner welfare spending as a % of GDP (I’ll blog about this chart later this week). My spreadsheet that creates this graph based on the Treasury’s official caseload and spending data from the 2024 Spring Budget is available here:
