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 back to the DWP, which issued a non-specific statement. In July, the former assessor gave an interview to "The Guardian". In it, he described how he had first heard trainers advocating the "bogus" interpretations of the test's descriptors in 2011 during a one-day conversion course covering the new version of the WCA and its new criteria. In response to the article's description of auditors instructing assessors — at the point when a report of a face-to-face assessment had been written, but had not yet been sent to the DWP — to alter their reports and reduce the number of points