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 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