Sixty areas of Britain have become so dependent on state handouts that more than half of all adults are unemployed and on benefits, official figures have revealed.

A league table of places with the highest number of benefit claimants, produced by the Conservatives, reveals that in one part of Rochdale 76% of working-age adults are receiving out-of-work benefits. Other areas where benefits have become a way of life include parts of Manchester, Liverpool, London and Plymouth.

In Britain, one in five children – 2.2m – now live in households entirely dependent on state benefits, the highest proportion in Europe.

Chris Grayling, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: “We are all paying a huge price for this failure as a nation, not just in the billions we spend on benefits but also in terms of social costs like crime and antisocial behaviour.”

The highest concentration of benefit claimants in Britain is in the Central and Falinge area of Rochdale, near Manchester, where 820 of 1,074 working-age adults are claiming out-of-work benefits.

In the northwest there are 25 areas where more than half the population is on out-of-work benefits, compared with eight in both the northeast and Wales, and five in both Yorkshire and the West Midlands.

Grayling will this week travel to an area with a high concentration of benefit claimants in Caerphilly, Wales. He will meet claimants, agencies and employers and discuss Tory plans to make the long term unemployed do community work or face a cut in benefits.

The mother of Scarlett Keeling, the Devon teenager found murdered on an Indian beach, has described how she saved more than £7,000 from child and other benefits to pay for the holiday that ended in tragedy.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Fiona MacKeown said she had saved £200 per week from benefits and other sources of income for nine months.

She also revealed that Scarlett was left in Goa without money for food or accommodation, which was provided by a 25-year-old tour operator that she later discovered was having a sexual relationship with her daughter.

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