Shake-up for 13,000 on benefit

OLDHAM is set to be a test bed for a radical new scheme to get people on incapacity benefit back to work — with private companies being paid by results.

Greater Manchester was named as one of the areas which will see the companies handed an initial payment once someone has been in work for six months, a further bonus after a year and then a final payment after two years.

The payments are spread over time to stop the companies simply getting people into dead-end jobs they do not want.

Outlined as part of the Government’s tough proposals to get people back into work, the measures were hailed by Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell as the biggest shake-up of the modern welfare state since the Beveridge Report of the 1940s.

It will mean more than 13,000 people across Oldham who claim incapacity benefit will be forced to undergo tough new tests to stop Britain’s growing “sicknote” culture.

People signed off from work will have to be independently-assessed by another GP to ensure they are not playing the system.

Incapacity benefit will be abolished by 2013 and income support will also be scrapped.

In their place will be a simplified system of two benefits — employment support allowance for those with medical problems which limit their ability to work, and jobSeekers’ allowance for those who are fit to work.

Ministers say there is not a right to life on benefits and want to up employment levels from 75 per cent to 80 per cent.

Oldham East and Saddleworth MP Phil Woolas said: “These proposals are designed to help people get jobs. Contrary to popular myth, fewer people are coming on the incapacity register than before. But it is right that we do everything we can to help them get a job.

“No one should worry, apart from those who are claiming fraudulently.”

Under the plans, claimants will have to carry out four weeks’ community work once they have been unemployed for more than a year. And after two years, they will be ordered to work full-time in the community.

Lone parents will be expected to find work when their youngest child is seven, and jobless people who take drugs will be banned from receiving dole money unless they accept treatment.