The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)
The Government are committed to delivering a radical overhaul of the welfare system to ensure that the benefits and tax credits systems is fairer and simpler and is more able to combat worklessness and poverty.
We are also making good progress to deliver on our commitment to reform the package of employment support which will ensure that benefit claimants have access to effective and high-quality support and that we deliver programmes which offer the taxpayer better value for money and also help move more people into work.
Work is well under way to introduce universal credit from 2013 and we have also recently launched the Work programme, the biggest single payment-by-results employment programme the United Kingdom has ever seen.
To ensure that we continue to build on these achievements, my Department will be exploring what further support could be used to help those claimants who have been claiming jobseeker’s allowance for long periods of time and who have been unable to find employment.
To help us gain a better understanding of what type of support could be most effective, we intend to run a small-scale trial to test whether with an increased level of support and opportunities to gain work experience, claimants have greater success in finding and staying in employment.
The trial will commence later this year across four Jobcentre Plus districts (Derbyshire; Lincolnshire, Rutland and Nottinghamshire; East Anglia; and Leicestershire and Northamptonshire) and will run for approximately nine months.
The evaluation of these trials, coupled with evidence from other programmes, will enable us to develop a better understanding of how best we can support the very long-term unemployed in the future.