Getting Britain Working

Iain Duncan Smith is poised to announce a radical new plan to reduce both the benefits bill and the NHS waiting lists in one.

The Work and Pensions Secretary's new initiative will see the long-term unemployed being forced to consent to their organs being used for transplants, or risk having their benefits reduced.

Sources within Whitehall have expressed their concern at the amount of time patients are spending on waiting lists for organ transplants and the amount their ongoing care in the meantime costs the NHS.

A DWP spokesman told us, "It seems ludicrous that at a time when Britain needs everyone to be striving rather than skiving, that there are perfectly functioning organs being wasted in the bodies of those whose prime ambition is to be awake in time for Jeremy Kyle."

"It makes sense for those organs to be removed and put to work in the bodies of decent, hard-working British people so they can provide for their decent, hard-working British families."

"This will result in significant savings from the benefits budget as a result of the donors no longer being eligible - mainly due to being dead - while also reducing the amount of time recipients have to wait for organs."

"Those who refuse to have their organs redistributed in this way will face having their benefits reduced. While we appreciate this may lead to them dying of malnutrition or hypothermia, clearly this will have the unintended side effect of freeing up their organs earlier than we would otherwise have expected."

"In order to avoid placing undue strain on the NHS by increasing the number of transplants it performs, we will of course be contracting these operations out to private sector partners."

Response within Westminster to the leaked proposals has been mixed, with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg describing them as "really not very nice at all", while UKIP's Nigel Farage has expressed concern that the organs may be taken by Bulgarians and Romanians who come into the country simply for the purpose of obtaining kidneys they can sell at a profit back home.