MINISTERS are to introduce new “human rights” covering housing, healthcare and education in a move critics fear could lead to a massive and costly expansion of the welfare state.

Plans for the new bill of rights will be unveiled tomorrow by Jack Straw, the justice secretary.

He will suggest that new entitlements such as rights to good healthcare, education and freedom from poverty could be added to traditional freedoms such as trial by jury and free speech.

The new rights would be offset by responsibilities, such as a duty to look for work in return for receiving benefits or to look after one’s children.

Tomorrow’s green paper is expected to face attack from those who believe such reforms are a distraction from the task of battling the recession.

There will also be fears that the plan would be another step towards a “nanny state”, providing further lucrative work for lawyers who have cashed in on the 1998 Human Rights Act.

David Heathcoat-Amory, a Conservative member of the Commons European scrutiny committee, warned that the introduction of “socio-economic rights ” would herald increased power for the state and restrict reforms.

“I very much doubt Margaret Thatcher would have been able to carry out the reforms she made in the 1980s if the institutions she reformed were covered by some kind of bill of rights,” he said. It is understood several cabinet ministers privately urged Gordon Brown to scrap the plan.

Straw’s deputy, Michael Wills, writing in today’s Sunday Times, insists the recession has made a bill of rights more important. He says: “Better articulating the responsibilities we owe and the rights we have is not an alternative to decisive action on the economic front but an essential complement to it.”

The Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, has been much criticised, particularly by Tories.

In his article, Wills says the government has no intention of scrapping the law. He says there may well be a case for not making the new rights enforceable in the courts, but adds: “Words have power in their own right. They can move us and mould our society even though they are not law.”

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