Duncan Smith announces partnership with Grim Reaper: Atos just too slow, minister claims

This location is more accessible to the disabled than more than fifty per cent of Atos assessment centres.

Later on today Iain Duncan Smith will announce that he is planning a massive shake-up of the welfare system which will see the Department of Work and Pensions end its controversial partnership with Atos, a private company that managed to make ‘fit for work’ the three most terrifying words in the English language since ‘Jimmy Savile’s here’, and instead work with the Grim Reaper from now on.

“Atos was just too slow,” Duncan Smith explained. “Despite their best efforts with the sick and disabled some are still alive. The Grim Reaper is going to deliver the results I really crave.”

This new scheme has already been criticised with people saying that the Grim Reaper has no medical qualifications so surely cannot correctly assess the health of benefit claimants.

“Well between you, me and the lodge of the massive country estate on which I live, I wouldn’t look too closely at the qualifications of some Atos assessors,” Smith confided. “You think it’s going to be a doctor, a consultation and a learned decision when what a lot of people get is a nurse(ish), a computer generated questionnaire that can’t be deviated from and less thought put into the enterprise than a cat employs when it decides whether or not to lick its bum.”

The shabbiness and cruelty of Atos has cost the tax payer tens of millions as people have launched appeals against its judgements.

“Another problem that won’t happen with the Grim Reaper,” crowed Smith joyfully. “No one who’s ever had an appointment with Death has come back to complain about it.”

Smith is also delighted by the cost of this new partnership.

“The Grim Reaper doesn’t want a salary,” he said. “Apparently he just wants my soul which is a win-win for me because I simply don’t have one.”