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
Incapacity Benefit savings for the Treasury. Professor Jonathan Portes, formerly the chief economist at the DWP and later the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, has described the Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme as "the biggest single social policy failure of the last fifteen years". Incapacity Benefit Incapacity Benefit is a British social security benefit that was introduced in 1995 in an attempt to control the rising number of people on out-of-work sickness benefits. In 2008, the government began to phase it out by making it unavailable to new claimants. Between 2011 and 2016 a compulsory reassessment programme moved