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Lord Freud has declared that the coalition government is "signed up" to welfare reform.
Speaking at the Association of Learning Providers' annual conference, the minister for welfare reform promised to launch a "series of major reforms" to the benefits system.
Freud said: "These major reforms encompass the structure of the benefits system, where we are committed to a Welfare Reform Bill, probably early next year. We have already announced a major change in the welfare-to-work regime, with the work programme, and we have started to tackle the housing benefits system."
"Why are we doing this? Why do we need such an extensive reform agenda? The answer is that we have real problems. We have a system which, bluntly, is broken."
Freud went on to outline two underlying reasons for problems in the system.
"Firstly, the benefits system that we have traps people in dependency. There can be huge risk involved in moving from being out of work to in work. We have created a group of people who are very risk-averse – the type of people who should be the most ready to take risks."
"Secondly, there is globalisation, and when you have people in China earning 46 cents an hour, you are looking at the value of unskilled labour falling and the number of jobs falling."
Freud readily accepted the scale of disorder in the benefits system, noting that 2.6 million people are currently on invalidity benefits – a combination of incapacity benefits and Employment and Support Allowance.
He noted that: "We need to reform the benefits system in a way that puts back incentives to work. We have introduced the work programme, a new welfare-to-work scheme, which tries to get people back into the workplace, integrating the skills that we need."
And the Tory peer, a former welfare adviser to the Labour Party, emphasised the political commitment to reform of the system, through schemes such as the work programme.
"This is something that the coalition is signed up to – and signed up to in a way that it is an absolutely central policy to this government – it is not peripheral," Freud noted.
Find out more about the Association of Learning Providers' annual conference.
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