Are Labour's work reforms up to the job?

Britain "simply isn't working", said Keir Starmer, as he announced plans to get more people into work by overhauling Jobcentres and cutting NHS waiting times.

The government has pledged to get two million more people into work through sweeping reforms to out-of-work support, increasing Britain's employment rate to 80% from its current level of around 75%.

Under plans published today, Jobcentres will be told to offer a "more personalised" service to people looking for work, with plans to "stop them simply monitoring benefits and refocus on offering tailored support such as CV advice and AI help with finding suitable openings", said The Times.

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A £45 million "youth guarantee" scheme will also aim to get hundreds of thousands of young people not in work or education into jobs or training. Teens could learn skills training at institutions such as the Premier League, Royal Shakespeare Company and Channel 4 as part of the government drive, reported The Guardian.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall also announced funds to cut waiting lists at the 20 NHS trusts with the highest levels of economic inactivity, "in a bid to get more people currently off sick back to work", said the BBC.

What did the commentators say?

The government's ambitions to "drag two million people off sickness and employment benefits and into jobs" should be "welcomed" said the Daily Mail. It would "give those coming off the dole the dignity of labour, slash the eye-watering welfare bill and fuel economic growth", said the paper. "Just one question: where are all these job vacancies going to be found?"

At the CBI conference this week "angry firms left the Chancellor in no doubt" as to what her National Insurance rises would mean for employment. Alongside the higher cost of minimum wage and new workers' rights, "companies are cutting jobs or not hiring new staff". It means that even if the government's "back-to-work blitz succeeds", there will be fewer jobs to fill. "This is another example of Labour's conflicting policies," said the paper. "As becomes ever clearer, one hand doesn't seem to know what the other is doing."

"Once you get past the word soup of their announcement, the only notable news is that Labour will launch a consultation on what to do in the spring," said Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately in The Telegraph. The plans are "as good as a confession that they haven't got a plan and they haven't got a clue what to do next", she said.

Ministers are already facing questions about whether the plan "will be up to the task of stemming the ­surging cost of ill health" after reform to the benefits system was delayed until next year. A "post-pandemic surge in illness that has made Britain an international outlier" with a record 2.8 million people off work through long-term sickness, said The Times. Spending on sickness benefits is now expected to "top £100 billion by the end of the parliament, double ­pre-Covid levels and more than the schools, police and courts budgets ­combined".

"If the new government intends to reduce the number of people on sickness or disability benefits from 2.8 million back to closer to the 2 million figure of five years ago, it needs to do this without coercion," said The Guardian. One lesson the government should take from the last 14 years is that "demoralising people is more likely to make them ill than productive".

Nevertheless, "policies to incentivise employment were inevitable given the shifts of the past few years", said the paper. And as long as social and health support systems are in place, the government's planned approach "is a reasonable one".

What next?

Much of the government's plan "will initially be ­tested in a series of pilot schemes around the country", said The Times. The government has also said there will be consultations next year on further "measures to overhaul the health and disability benefits system".