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
Incapacity Benefit disabilities to find suitable jobs, this reassessment programme was supposed to have saved seven billion pounds a year from the welfare budget by 2018. In practice, this major Whitehall project failed to generate any savings for the Exchequer. In 1995, the Conservative Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley, abolished Invalidity Benefit and replaced it with Incapacity Benefit after the Prime Minister of the day, John Major, had complained about the burgeoning caseload, saying: "Frankly, it beggars belief that so many more people have suddenly become invalids, especially at a time when the health of the population has improved".