What’s happened to the WCA under UC? At last we know!

This is a rapid post in response to statistics released earlier today – please let me know if you do further analyses of these statistics and I’ll link them in the comments below.

Please see the comment at the bottom of this page for an important update!

After continual pressure from campaigners, academics, and politicians, the DWP have finally published some statistics on the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) under Universal Credit. This is a crucial step: it has been almost impossible to understand what has been happening to benefits disability assessments over the past few years, and UC WCA’s are now moving into the light. In this post, I quickly summarise a few headline findings.

[A quick word of explanation: in what follows, I put together the figures on the WCA under Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) with the new figures on the WCA under Universal Credit (UC). I also look at the total incapacity benefits caseload, using further statistics on ESA from Stat-Xplore. The new release also has a warning that the ESA and UC figures come from different data sources, though there is no reason to think this will significantly affect the numbers below].

How many WCAs have been happening?

The first thing is just to check on how many WCAs have been happening. For ESA, we know that there were 800,000 WCAs in 2014 and 750,000 in 2015, dropping slightly to 600,000 in 2016 and 500,000 in 2017.

It’s then difficult to be sure of what happened in 2018 and the start of 2019, because the new UC figures don’t start until April 2019. But there were probably around 400,000 WCAs in 2019, and 450,000 WCAs in 2020 (despite a sharp drop due to Covid-19, with the monthly rate dropping from 75k in Feb to 20-30k for Apr-Sep 2020). In both cases, WCAs are overwhelmingly happening on UC, with only relatively small numbers on ESA. More recently, the number of WCAs has continued to rise – there were 550k WCAs in 2021 and 700k in 2022.

In summary: there was a sharp fall in the number of WCAs from 2015, falling to nearly half their previous level in 2019 (and possibly even lower in 2018). This has since been followed by a steady rise that takes us back to the same level of WCAs as 2015.

How many people have been found fit-for-work?

If we combine the WCA outcomes across both UC and ESA, then we can see how the strictness of the WCA has been changing over time. Note that this figure starts in 2014 (because the newly-published statistics are only consistent to around then), but in an earlier blog you can see the WCA was far harsher when it started in 2008, and became more generous to 2014 – partly in response to a massive outcry from claimants, campaigners and the public.

Anyway – the more recent trends below show that the Fit-for-Work rate was 30-40% in 2014-18, but has fallen since. This was particularly the case during Covid-19, but since the middle of 2021 the Fit-for-Work rate has been steady at 15-20%.

Figure 1: Trends in WCA outcomes across UC and ESA

Conversely, more people are being placed in both the LCW/WRAG group and particularly the Support/LCWRA Group. (Note that this is also a period in which the treatment of the LCW/WRAG has changed; at the moment they don’t receive extra money within their UC claim, though it does nevertheless change their work allowances and maximum conditionality).

How many people are claiming ‘incapacity benefits’ on UC/ESA?

Finally, we can look at the numbers of people claiming work-related disability benefits (which the DWP sometimes terms ‘incapacity benefits’, to separate them from PIP/DLA), shown in the figure below. (Note: I’m not sure if these figures are newly-released, but I thought they were useful to include here anyway).

You might first notice that there’s a jump in the total figures in May 2019 – but this is an artefact of the data (as this is when the UC figures start). The slight dip before is also probably just because of data limitations.

What is more interesting, though, is that we have seen a steady rise in the numbers claiming incapacity benefits since summer 2020. It is not clear whether these are all new claimants, or whether these include the large group of new Covid-19 UC claimants gradually working their way through the UC Health Journey, given that there were far fewer WCAs at the start of Covid-19.

Figure 2: Total numbers of people on incapacity benefits

Reflections on the UC WCA stats

It is incredibly useful to get these statistics at last – but it is astonishing that it has taken quite so long (and taken quite so much effort by so many people) for them to be published.

There is also lots that we don’t know:

• We do not have the detailed breakdowns of the WCA on UC that we had for ESA (e.g. the detailed reasons why people were placed in different groups, or splits by medical condition), nor any information on mandatory reconsiderations or appeals.
• Nor do we have some of the breakdowns that Stat-Xplore offers for other benefits, e.g. to split the UC Health Journey caseload by people’s total duration on UC so far (which would help us see how long people were claiming UC before having a WCA).
• It would be interesting to see how many assessments were done by video call, and whether the outcomes were different than for face-to-face assessments.
• And I am still desperate to actually do research on what happens in WCAs – but the DWP have so far not let researchers do this.

There is a ‘WCA release strategy’, which explains that there are already plans to fill in many of these gaps – it’s unclear when this will happen, but it’s promising to be able to see their plans.

In the meantime, we now know a little more about how the WCA is operating than we did yesterday. And do please put thoughts and links to further analyses of this data in the comments underneath, to continue the conversation.