PEOPLE OUT of work in Britain for longer than six months would risk losing their welfare benefits under a major Conservative Party plan to be unveiled at its conference in Manchester this week.
Under the plan, existing back-to-work programmes would be amalgamated.
Young people would get extra help after six months to get work, while the 2.6 million claiming incapacity benefit would be examined again to see if they should qualify for it.
Fifty thousand young people would be assigned to sole traders “for six months of meaningful work experience and mentoring”, while small firms would be given incentives to create 100,000 apprenticeships.
Conservative leader David Cameron is to tell delegates that welfare reform is “at the heart of the drive for jobs”, which has been drafted by a former Labour adviser, Lord David Freud.
Saying he had rejected advice that the Conservatives should be cautious and wait for the election to fall into their hands, Mr Cameron said that “far from playing it safe, the Conservative Party has a radical agenda for returning power and responsibility to people”.
“It will mean massive change in the way we run this country, how we live our lives, and what we expect from government and each other.
"In the words of Martin Luther King, 'when you're right, you can't be too radical'," he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
Elsewhere, he said: “This year, unemployment rose at the fastest rate on record. One in five young people are out of work.
“And even before the recession almost five million people were claiming out-of-work benefits.
“It is vital that we get to grips with this problem. It’s not just that it comes with a price-tag of tens of billions a year. It’s that mass unemployment can lead to massive social problems – like family breakdown and crime – and that affects us all.
“A crisis of this scale, that runs so deep, cannot be solved with one policy or programme alone. It means ripping up the old way of doing things and bringing radical change across the whole of our economy,” he said.
Questioned yesterday, the Conservative leader again refused to give new details about the spending cuts he argues are necessary to restore the UK’s finances to health.
Up to now he has focused on some politically popular issues, such as identify cards.
However, he insisted that the Tory shadow chancellor, George Osborne, will speak on spending cuts this week.
But Mr Cameron again repeated that spending cuts were necessary, arguing that the treasury’s deficit and the UK’s national debt were now so large that higher taxes and interest rates may be an inevitability.
“The real danger to the British economy is not dealing with the deficit,” Mr Cameron told the BBC’s Andrew Marr in a Sunday morning TV interview, “The real danger is pretending the deficit is not there.”
However, Mr Cameron’s declaration that front-line health and education jobs would be safeguarded means that other government departments could suffer cuts of up to 14 per cent, according to some financial experts.
Britain’s deficit will exceed 12 per cent of gross domestic product this year, making it the worst-performing of the world’s biggest economies, while rating agencies have already warned that its AAA rating is at risk.