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
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