DAVID CAMERON is to unveil a plan to get Britain back to work by forcing millions of welfare claimants into training.
The assault on the dependency culture is similar to programmes in America. Private firms that prepare people for employment and place them in jobs would be paid by results.
Most people who have been unemployed for more than six months, including the disabled and single mothers, would be required to join the new privatised schemes or see their payments cut.
The so-called Work Programme, to be unveiled at the partys conference in Manchester tomorrow, coincides with the revelation that Iain Duncan Smith, the former party leader, would be Camerons adviser on broken Britain if the Tories win the election.
Duncan Smith, who is regarded as the Tories boldest thinker on social justice, would chair a cabinet committee in a future Conservative government looking at ways of improving the plight of the poorest Britons, The Sunday Times has learnt. It is not clear whether he would become a cabinet minister or be given a senior role outside the cabinet.
The moves by Cameron are designed to counter the Labour charge that the Conservatives would repeat the errors of the 1980s recession and leave the unemployed on the scrap heap. The detailed preparations would enable the Tories to avoid the paralysis that dogged Labours efforts at welfare reform when it was elected in 1997.
The welfare plan is the brainchild of Lord Freud, the former Labour adviser who defected to the Tories earlier this year. It would abolish the Labour governments New Deal programme designed to get the long-term unemployed into work. It would also effectively mean the end of Jobcentre Plus, where bureaucrats design training programmes for the unemployed.
