Feel the benefits; Your Say.

A NEW tough report has been prepared for the independent policy think-tank Reform. Its title - Help! Refashioning Welfare Reform To Help Fight The Recession - faces calls for an overhaul of the British benefits system.

Issues raised in the report include making Brits earn their state handouts and time limits to be imposed to prevent claimants spending a lifetime on the dole.

Back in the 1980s, the Conservatives introduced one of their very few successful Back To Work schemes. It was titled The Community Programme.

This offered the long-term unemployed local work in their community for 12 months. The scheme paid a realistic salary well before the minimum wage was introduced.

People asked why it was abandoned in 1989. But due to such high running costs it was replaced by a series of penny-pinching pilots such as Workfare, based on an American idea where the unemployed are frog-marched down to the beaches, into the countryside, even assembling on the sidings of motorways for a mass litter pick.

In some areas such as Hull and Medway, a scheme was created in the 1990s under the title Project Work, a compulsory work-for-your-dole Government exercise which was dubbed by some locals as "the chain gang", with unemployed actually breaking rocks to build stone walls.

Most of these schemes were piloted, or abandoned outright when the bills for insurance were quoted, and remember these were in the days when health and safety rules were relaxed.

So why similar work-for-your-dole ideas are being rolled out in today's cautious society does not bear thinking about.

In October 2009, the privately run Flexible New Deal begins where claimants will be made to undertake four weeks of full-time unpaid community work or work-related activity, or have their benefits axed.

Schemes of this magnitude take great skills in organisation and foresight - traits that seem to be lacking in any of today's main political parties.

If there are jobs out there to be created, why doesn't the Government pump some money into them as there are tens of thousands of young unemployed desperate for work.

It's funny how jobs suddenly surface when wage-paying isn't a requirement.

MICHAEL CARSON, Marske