Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment OBR confirmed that the reforms themselves had done nothing to reduce levels of welfare spending — although a simple freezing of benefit payments, so that they did not rise with inflation, had limited the extent of fiscal failure. But in fiscal year 2016-17, the budget in question had nevertheless risen to £15 billion a year. In 2016, the NAO published another evaluation of the DWP's disability assessment contracts: it said the cost of each WCA had risen from £115 under Atos to £190 under Maximus, to no benefit to the Exchequer. A former chief economist at the DWP, Professor Jonathan
Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment Portes, has described the use of the WCA to reassess long-term recipients of sickness benefits as "the biggest single social policy failure of the last fifteen years". The WCA's designers acknowledged that being found fit for work and ineligible for sickness benefit could, in some circumstances, harm a recipient's physical or mental health. For this reason, one of the WCA's eligibility criteria — the descriptor Substantial Risk — applies where there is, on balance, more than a small risk of harm if the claimant were to be declared 'fit for work'. The deployment of the WCA since 2010 has been