Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment awarded, Atos said: In August, the whistleblower expanded on his allegations in a first-hand account published by the "British Medical Journal". He suggested that the DWP's alleged actions might have been at least partly driven by pressure to "reduce government debt". The DWP's senior doctors made no reply but the clinical director of Atos did respond. In relation to the claim that some Atos assessors had been led to interpret the test's criteria too harshly, she did not deny that the "bogus rules of thumb" had been used in training talks but she said that assessors were expected to follow
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