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 was nothing in the regulations that inherently trapped people on Incapacity Benefit: recipients were free to relinquish their payments and seek work if they felt able to, although the meagre gains from moving into a poorly paid and insecure job were thought to act as a deterrent to doing so - a phenomenon that Working Tax Credits and Universal Credit were designed to mitigate. In 2011, out-of-work sickness benefits had an annual cost of £13billion: the Chancellor, George Osborne, called this "a very large budget". The total annual budget of the Department for Work and Pensions in 2011 was £180