Government looks to get UK working once again

The United Kingdom's employment minister has told the Financial Times newspaper she wants a "cultural change" in the country around working and the benefits system, in a bid to increase the number of people in work.

Alison McGovern said new proposals to be announced by the government soon will give a fundamental overhaul to a system that she said left too many people "on the scrapheap".

Currently, employment support services in the UK are only open to benefit claimants, rather than the wider public, and she said too much time was being eaten up by employees monitoring the job-seeking efforts of people receiving government support.

Unless they can show that they have spent a set amount of time looking for work, their benefits could be withdrawn.

"(The employment service) is the most unloved public service. That has to change … the obsession with benefits management must end if we're to bring about the change the country is crying out for, and that's why we have a plan to get Britain working again," she said.

The government's target is to get the employment rate to 80 percent, which would be higher than it has been in more than 160 years, and one of the highest levels in the world. Currently, it is around 74.5 percent, and the Financial Times said the UK is the only "rich country" that has an employment rate not yet back to where it was before the novel coronavirus pandemic.

"The lockdown generation has been failed, consigned to the scrapheap because they have been denied the support and opportunities to find work, get into work, and get on at work," she said.

Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies, which led a recent study on how to make the employment service more effective, said "people outside the labor force don't trust Jobcentres", because of factors such as the monitoring of efforts to find employment, and reducing that would free up workers to put more effort into helping people find better work.

During the course of the current parliament, the proposals put forward by the Commission on the Future of Employment Support could cost up to 150 million pounds ($198 million) per year, at a time when the new Labour Party government is trying to find ways to deal with what Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has called a "fiscal black hole" left behind by its Conservative Party predecessor.

But McGovern said the current situation showed that this would be an investment worth making.

"Look at the cost of what we're doing now … I find it difficult to believe we can't do better," she added.