be allowed to recommend a claimant for the Support Group without asking an authorised colleague for permission to do so. When the doctor asked an experienced assessor where these rules had come from, she replied: "DWP". Both the DWP and Atos categorically denied ever having had any target for getting claimants off sickness benefits. However, both eventually admitted that Support Group "norms" were being used nationwide, though they both denied that the purpose of "targeted audit" was to limit the number of claimants placed in the Support Group. Atos said that the audit process triggered by the breach of a "norm" was intended to ensure consistency across the firm's UK team: if the assessor's reports met the DWP's expectations, the healthcare professional would not be asked to change their recommendations. In the phase from the inception of the WCA in October 2008 to November 2010, only new claims for ESA were assessed. A 'norm' of 1 in 8 or 12.5% was in use as the benchmark for targeted audit during the Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme, suggesting that the DWP was expecting a very similar proportion of claimants to be recommended for the Support Group overall. However, Professor Harrington has described the set of people making fresh claims as "a completely different group of people" from long-term recipients, who generally have a significantly higher level of disability than new claimants. Moreover, studies of long-term Incapacity Benefit recipients carried out by the DWP before the 'roll out' of the Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme suggested that 31% of established recipients - almost 1 in 3 - would be suitable for the Support Group. Despite this, the 'norm' does not appear to have been adjusted upwards to reflect the more severe disabilities experienced by the people being tested from 2011 onwards. In 2013, the Work Programme's training providers - outsourcing companies who coach and train people put into the Work-Related Activity Group after their WCA - complained that claimants who were "clearly unfit for any type of work-related activity" were nonetheless being put in the Work-Related Activity Group rather than the Support Group, and that "claimants with terminal cancer, whose life expectancies were shorter than the work-ready prognosis" had been referred to them for pre-employment training. Much later, a Green Paper provided more evidence that a de facto outcome target had been in use. In 2016 the government conceded that: In December 2016, the