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 welfare budget. In 2015 the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) found that no savings had been made to date: the sickness benefit budget remained at more than £13billion a year. Furthermore, because many more claimants than forecast were being placed in the Support Group, the government's fiscal watchdog "raised" its estimate for spending on sickness benefits by one billion pounds a year. In 2016 the OBR said that the reforms had still made no impact on the level of welfare spending — although a simple freezing of benefit payments, so that they did not rise with inflation, had made some