There should be no “free-riding” on the welfare state, the new Work and Pensions Secretary said yesterday as the Government outlined a “carrot and stick” approach to reform.

James Purnell, the most Blairite minister in the Cabinet, set out, with Gordon Brown, proposals to require people to obtain the skills they need or face sanctions. Every unemployed person would have a “skills check” to help Britain to raise its skills game to world class, Mr Brown said.

One in five under-21s would be steered towards an apprenticeship, and private and voluntary sectors would be used to create the training posts. People refusing to take the chances given to them would lose benefit, first for two weeks, then for four weeks, and then for up to 26 weeks.

Mr Purnell, in his first outing since taking over from Peter Hain last week, said that he planned to accelerate the Government’s welfare reforms and to deepen their reach. The Government wanted to tackle economic inactivity, and set the ambitious goals of moving one million people off incapacity benefit and helping 300,000 more single parents to find work.

“To get there, we will need major reforms of inactive benefits,” Mr Purnell said. “There will be a special category for people on incapacity benefit who cannot work, but for the rest we will require them to look for work. We will start with new claimants and with existing claimants under 25. Our ambition must be to help everyone in this group look for work and train for work.”

He said that the Government wanted to work with the best providers of jobs and training, whether they were from the private, public or voluntary sectors. In classic Blairite language he added: “We should not be ideological about who provides the service, we should just work out who is best at providing it.”

Mr Purnell said that in return for the reforms, people who were able to work would be obliged to take part in training schemes or face sanctions. “There should be no free-riding on the welfare state. It is an insult to people who have contributed and it is an insult to the people who need help.”

David Frost, the director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said that apprenticeship schemes would succeed only if they were rigorous and of a high standard. “The Government has promised private sector-led solutions in the past but now is the time to deliver,” he said.

Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB union, said: “The GMB has demonstrated that, in areas where there are high levels of employment, there are low levels of people claiming benefits and vice versa. Forcing people to leave benefits for nonexistent jobs is a complete waste of time and is totally misguided. The new Work and Pensions Secretary needs to learn that lesson very quickly.”

Mr Brown told an audience of employers that a new national effort was needed to raise the level of skills among workers and job-seekers. He announced that the Government was aiming to increase the number of apprenticeships by 90,000 over the next five years so that 220,000 people were on such training schemes every year.

Whitehall departments will be told to create more apprenticeships and companies will be encouraged to target more girls for certain jobs, such as those in engineering and construction. Mr Brown said that, a generation ago, a British prime minister faced tackling the global arms race but today his challenge was the global skills race.

Of today’s six million unskilled workers, he said, only a fraction would be able to find work in the future unless they increased their training.

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