Maximus Health Services, who took over from Atos, says it will carry out assessments in a ‘timely manner’

The backlog of fitness-to-work assessments for benefits recipients could take as long as 18 months to clear, according to the company being brought in to deal with the problem.

Maximus Health Services UK was awarded a £500m three-year contract that starts in March, after Atos Healthcare ended its contract early following criticism about the number and speed of assessments it had carried out.

More than 600,000 appeals have been lodged against Atos judgments since the work capability assessments began, costing taxpayers £60m a year. In four out of 10 cases the original decisions are overturned.

Leslie Wolfe, president of Maximus, said it would aim to carry out assessments in a “timely manner”, but warned that improvements would not happen overnight. “It’ll take some time to hire the healthcare professionals. The expectation is that in 12 to 18 months, we should be able to catch up on the waiting times,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We’re hopeful that if we [conduct] the assessments in a timely manner, some of that anger and resentment will go away.”

Maximus is already used by the Department for Work and Pensions to carry out welfare schemes and has said it will take on a significant number of additional staff to deal with assessments.

The Commons work and pensions select committee found earlier this year that the assessment system, which is used to determine whether hundreds of thousands of benefit claimants with a disability or long-term illness are capable of working, was so flawed that it should be scrapped and completely redesigned.

The MPs on the committee said the ESA system was crude, simplistic and failed to help claimants return to the workforce. They described the work capability assessment (WCA) test as frequently inaccurate and a “stressful and anxiety-provoking experience” for many claimants.

The committee’s report, published in July, warned: “The flaws in the existing ESA system are so grave that simply ‘rebranding’ the WCA by taking on a new provider will not solve the problems: a fundamental redesign of the ESA end-to-end process is required.”

Minister for disabled people Mark Harper told MPs this week that Maximus could deliver. “We have confidence – both from the bid that they put together but also looking at the successful contracts they have operated in Australia, Canada and USA – that Maximus are able to deliver these assessments competently over the next three years,” he told the House of Commons.

An Atos spokeswoman said the French company was assessing more people than its contractual agreement stipulated and was reducing the backlog month-by-month. “The department are aware of the number of healthcare professionals we have delivering this service and how many people we can reasonably see each month. It is of primary importance that we give people the time they need during the assessment process,” she said.