Government plans benefits overhaul: United Kingdom

London, Feb 12: The government is planning to announce an overhaul of the welfare system to force unemployed people who cannot speak English to learn the language or risk losing their benefits, media reports said today.

Ministers are also looking at forcing single parents back to work more quickly, according to the Guardian newspaper, while a tink-tank report said that around one in three British households received more than half their income in benefits.

Welfare minister Jim Murphy is set to announce the overhaul of the system later today.

Government figures show that 15 per cent of unemployed ethnic minorities have language problems and paying for translators in job centres costs 4.5 million pounds a year money ministers believe would be better spent on providing English lessons.

''Potentially that's 40,000 people being denied the opportunity to work because they do not have the language skills to get a job,'' Murphy will say, according to the Guardian.

The paper said Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton is also considering forcing single parents to look for work when their children are younger in order to be eligible for state benefits.

Currently lone parents do not have to attend job interviews until their children are 14 and the paper said the government was considering lowering this age to 12 or even younger.

It said single parents in France and Germany had to look for work when their children were as young as three.

The plans come as a study by think-tank Civitas said that around 30 per cent of all households got more than half their income from state benefits despite a fall in unemployment.

It said tax credits were the main cause.

''What has been happening in the last few year is unemployment has fallen but the number of people receiving incapacity benefits has been going up a little bit,'' the report's author David Green told BBC radio.

''But there's also been a huge increase in people receiving what's now called working tax credit. So you've got a mixture of pure benefit dependency and what you might call in-work benefit dependency.''

Reuters