He hadn’t worked for decades. In his fifties, with visible learning difficulties, he’d spent the day in the park, sitting on a bench, drinking. I met him in a hostel for the homeless. Rootless. But I left him with one, overriding sensation. That it didn’t have to be like this. He could do more with the rest of his life with help and guidance. It would take work, care and effort. But it could be done.

This week will see the publication of the latest unemployment figures. Almost certainly they will see the total claimant count pass a million for the first time in years. If it wasn’t for the way the government excludes some New Deal claimants from the figures, it would be there already. The overall figure for unemployment, including those who are not claiming benefits – which Gordon Brown preferred when he was in opposition – will be close to 2m. Every expert says it will go much higher.

But the headline unemployment figures hide a much starker picture. Some 2.6m more people are claiming incapacity benefits. Three-quarters of those could be working. Another 750,000 have part-time jobs because they say they can’t find a full-time one. Probably 3.5m people are genuinely unemployed – another 750,000 people underemployed.

It’s a legacy of 10 wasted years, when millions of jobs have gone to migrant workers but benefit dependency has remained endemic in many communities up and down the country. It’s for that man in the hostel for the homeless that I really worry – and for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people like him up and down the country. We could have done so much over the past decade to show them the way to a better life – but we stood aside.

Yet in cities such as New York enlightened welfare support programmes transformed the lives of many people: the people who had abandoned work because of chronic depression – and needed that extra push to get them back there; the people with a physical problem that made it impossible to pursue the job they had been doing – but with the right help could have made a fresh start.

How could a Labour government that claimed concern about the vulnerable have waited so long while other countries showed the way forward? Billions of pounds were spent on the New Deal, but only a small minority of the new jobs went to British benefit claimants. And after a decade the number of people on incapacity benefit has hardly changed.

And now the world is much tougher. The jobs market is a different place from that of even a year ago. The dole queues are lengthening. Unemployment will be the dominant political issue of the next 12 months. Britain will need innovative proposals to support the jobs market – like the Conservatives’ plan to give those businesses that can still hire new employees a cash incentive if they take on someone who has been unemployed for more than three months.

Brown consistently demanded employment support programmes when he was in opposition in the last recession. I don’t understand why he doesn’t seem to think we need similar action now. And the people in real danger of being left behind are those with the most challenging circumstances: people who will need that extra help, that extra counselling, that extra push – and an enlightened employer willing to give them a chance.

In a difficult job market, they must not be left behind. We must not allow the current economic challenges we face to condemn millions of people already trapped in benefit dependency to remain stuck there for years and years more.

Even in the depths of the last recession, 700,000 people who had been unemployed for more than three months found new jobs each year.

The labour market remains fluid even when jobs are scarce. That’s why US-style back-to-work support should be made available to those 2.6m people on incapacity benefit now – not bit by bit after 2010. If it’s the right thing to do, then why wait? If you talk to our most vulnerable benefit claimants, one thing strikes you loud and clear. What holds those people back is not a desire to live a life on benefits. It is a lack of self-confidence, a lack of belief that there is anything better. They have a sense of being on a scrap heap with no way out. Headlines about job cuts and unemployment will drive many further into their shells. We must not leave them there.

When you talk to those who are finally taking real steps towards getting back to the world of employment, they almost invariably say the same thing: “I wish I’d done this years ago.” They wish someone had given them the push they needed.

I suspect that man in the hostel is still on his park bench. But when the unemployment figures are published again this week we must not forget those at the bottom of the pile. They have been forgotten for a decade. They must not be forgotten again.

Chris Grayling is shadow work and pensions secretary

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