What ministers herald as key reform is in fact unworkable. The plans would be laughable if they weren’t so harmful
There is a scene in The Simpsons in which the villainous Mr Burns enlists a team of monkeys to reproduce a Charles Dickens novel on the cheap. Hunched over a row of typewriters, the simians cannot get the job done without a range of bumbling typos.
I thought of this as I watched Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, on Monday set out so-called cost-saving changes to the flagship disability benefit, personal independence payment (Pip), in what he described as “probably the most fundamental reforms in a generation”.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
