The long term unemployed people will be forced to do four weeks of unpaid community work per year or they will lose their £65-a-week unemployment benefits. This reform plan, to be further explained this week by the work and pensions secretary Ian Duncan Smith, has two main objectives – to identify those people working illegally and help thelong-term unemployed get back into the ‘work habit’. Some 5 million people in the UK receive some form of unemployment benefit, with 1.4 million people having spent 9 out of the last 10 years being unemployed.

Source: theirishtimes/08.11.2010