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 department was about to publish it anyway or it would not be in the public interest because the data might be misinterpreted. But in August 2015, the DWP was forced to reveal that between December 2011 and February 2014, 2,380 claimants had died after being declared fit for work. However, as Dr Ben Goldacre has explained, an imprecise question in the original FOI request and an unhelpful DWP response — which Goldacre characterised as "essentially a PDF and an excel spreadsheet full of red herrings" — meant that no firm conclusion could be drawn from these figures alone about whether