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 (WCA)". However, a decision later that year to overhaul the test's criteria delayed the start of the reassessment programme. In the autumn of 2010, with Freud now a government minister responsible for welfare reform, two pilot studies took place. 1347 people who had been on Incapacity Benefit for more than two years were assessed against the new criteria that would be used to gauge the fitness for work of more than two million such people from the spring of the following year. Professor Harrington asked MIND, Mencap and the National Autistic Society to "provide recommendations on refining the mental, intellectual