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 Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said the test, which her party had described as "tough but fair" in its 2010 manifesto, had been "discredited" by the coalition government. In February 2018 Kent University academic Ben Geiger, who has made international comparisons of the WCA and who was also a policy advisor to the DWP in 2015 and 2016, described the WCA as having been "a failure by almost any criteria". He explained that "there is no transparent evidence that the WCA captures the demands of work in Britain today" and said the test was "perhaps the greatest