lofthouse
Saturday 7th September 2013 3:40pm
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13,890 posts
One million of Britain's lowest paid employees will be classed as "not working enough" and could find themselves pushed with the threat of sanctions to find more income under radical changes to benefits, the Department for Work and Pensions has said.
DWP internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal that people earning between £330 and around £950 a month - just under the rate of the national minimum wage for a 35-hour week - could be mandated to attend jobcentre meetings where their working habits will be examined as part of the universal credit programme.
Some of those deemed to be "not working enough" could also be instructed to take on extra training - and if they fail to complete tasks they could be stripped of their UC benefits in a move which departmental insiders conceded is controversial.
The DWP said that their overall plans for those in low-paid work were not yet definite and recognised that supporting working families to increase their income was a complex area into which the state hadn't previously intervened. But the department estimates there are one million people in this lower-paid bracket.
Not all of those will be forced into jobcentres, with individuals with caring responsibilities or other constraints preventing them taking on full-time work highly likely to be excluded.
The DWP said: "There isn't any real clear, definite plan as to how this [part] would work."
However the department did confirm that docking social security payments for those who are categorised as "not working enough" formed part of their plans.
The shadow work and pensions minister, Liam Byrne, said that the policy was attempting to push people into work that wasn't there. "What this out-of-touch government fails to realise is that there simply aren't that many extra shifts to go around. Millions are locked out of work and millions more are desperate to increase their hours."
The senior ministers involved in heading up welfare reform have spoken about how their flagship reform would completely change the culture of benefits.
Speaking in parliament during answers to urgent questions on Thursday, Iain Duncan Smith said: "Universal credit isn't just about IT, it is massively about cultural change, to get people back to work and to ensure those who do go to work, particularly the poorest, benefit the most."
Documents seen by the Guardian show how millions of people currently in receipt of some sort of benefit will be categorised into seven classes including, "too sick to work", "too committed to work", a category including lone parents, and those deemed to be "not working enough".
UC aims to merges six different benefits with the claimant receiving a single monthly household payment, although earlier this week the National Audit Office warned that the underlying IT project had been beset by "weak management ineffective control and poor governance" and that £34m of the £303m spent on technology had already been written off.