Just when you thought the proponents of the ubiquitous mobile phone had exhausted the imagination in finding new roles for the essential tool of the era, they come up with another one.

Bad enough that mobile phone companies see their products as being the future for the online world with Internet access on handsets already reality and the technology advancing by the month.

The growth of the phone has made them an indispensable part of the work culture with people now expected to be contactable 24 hours a day.

Now the unemployed are being targeted. People in unemployment blackspots in Britain are to be offered free mobile phones to ensure they get quicker access to vacancies.

Special personal advisers will phone or send text messages about job vacancies within minutes of them being advertised.

The thinking of the Labour government is that the problem of unemployment is not so much one of no vacancies but of getting information about those slots to people out of work. Strikes me that the initiative will remove one of the very few enforced advantages of unemployment - the opportunity to sleep in.