User:CircleGirl/ESAFiscal

Not Making Expected Savings
In 2006, the government set out its plans for welfare reform: by 2018, it expected to shrink the number of people on out-of-work sickness benefits by one million, thereby saving £7 billion a year. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) found that in the period up to 2014, spending as a percent of gross domestic product fell significantly between the 1985-1986 tax year and the 2012-2013 tax year. However, these savings were not as much as the government had initially forecast.In 2015, because many more claimants than forecast were now being placed in the Support Group, the OBR raised its estimate for annual spending on ESA by at least £1 billion. In 2016 the OBR confirmed that the reforms had not made the expected reductions welfare spending — although freezing the uprating of benefit payments, so that they did not rise with inflation, had reduced levels of welfare spending. The Former chief economist at the DWP, Professor Jonathan Portes, argues that the reason that these savings were not as great as expected is because of multiple factors, including a high number of appeals, which meant more people than expected were claiming ESA, as well as backlogs in assessments

Cost of Outsourcing Contracts for WCA
In 2012, the DWP's handling of its contract with Atos was the subject of a critical report by the National Audit Office (NAO). The Public Accounts Committee heard that in that year the DWP had paid Atos £112m to carry out WCAs. The chair of the committee told the BBC that the DWP got "far too many decisions wrong on claimants’ ability to work" and that this came at a "considerable cost to the taxpayer" because the independent tribunals that corrected the wrong decisions, funded by the Ministry of Justice, added a further £50m a year to the costs. 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.

Criticisms of Cuts to Spending
The reductions of spending on ESA- including the cap on uprating- have been linked in a report by Oxfam and the New Policy Institute to increased levels of poverty in the UK. The report argued that many families were struggling to pay for essentials, such as food and travel.