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 course of a decade but it increased it by two billion pounds. The government has said there is no causal link between the WCA process itself and the deaths of people found fit for work. A medical expert who played a lead role in selecting the test's mental health criteria in 2007 later told MPs that the DWP had been "forced into rushing the design of the WCA". In February 2018 a former Conservative minister at the DWP, Baroness Altmann, said: "The extent of the appeals clearly indicates that something is seriously wrong with the system". In the same month