Young people on Universal Credit or PIP will 'lose benefits' in DWP crackdown

Young people who won’t take up work will lose benefits, Liz Kendall has warned. Young people who receive Universal Credit or Personal Independence Payment (PIP) who refuse to take up jobs or training will lose their benefits in the government’s crackdown on worklessness, Liz Kendall has said.

The work and pensions secretary said on Sunday: “If people repeatedly refuse to take up the training or work responsibilities, there will be sanctions on their benefits.” Asked on Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips if this meant losing those benefits, Kendall replied: “Yes.” drive to get more people into work and cut the government’s welfare bill, which has ballooned since the Covid crisis.

“The reason why we believe this so strongly is that we believe in our responsibility to provide those new opportunities, which is what we will do,” Kendall told Sky. “We will transform those opportunities, but young people will be required to take them up, just as they did in the late 1990s with the new deal for young people, and the late noughties with the future jobs fund, because it is so damaging for young people not to have skills or not to be in work.”

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Kendall added: “I do not want an ever increasing benefits bill spent on the cost of failure, people trapped out of work, terrible for their life chances, and paid for by the taxpayer.” Asked on the BBC ’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg whether there were people who could work but did not work, Kendall said: “Yes.”

She said: “I know from speaking to our job coaches, our fantastic job coaches in jobcentres, that there are people who could work, who aren’t. But I think they are in the minority.” Ms Kendall said some people who were out of work had “self-diagnosed” mental health problems, though she stressed there was a “genuine problem with mental health in this country”.