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| Tories announce expansion of 'work club' scheme for unemployed Chris Grayling reveals plans to help boost initiatives allowing jobseekers to 'work together and help each other'The employment minister, Chris Grayling, today announced the expansion of a "work club" scheme to get the unemployed back into work.The move followed George Osborne's announcement of a cap on benefits earlier today."Britain today has five million people claiming out of work benefits," Grayling told the Tory conference in Birmingham. "One in five households is entirely dependent on benefits, with no one working."Nearly a million people of working age have never worked. It is nothing short of a national scandal."He blamed the problem on Labour and said welfare reform was at the top of the government's agenda, adding: "Go into every town or city centre up and down the country and you will find enterprising people from overseas who have managed to find jobs."And we still have five million people here on out of work benefits. It's just madness."Grayling said the government "shouldn't try to do everything itself" and would "harness the skills" of individuals, businesses, the voluntary sector and local government.He added that the government would help work clubs, which would allow jobseekers to "work together and help each other", to get off the ground.In addition, the coalition would "launch a real drive to encourage the unemployed to look at volunteering as an option" in order to build up their experience and skills.He hailed the universal credit being introduced by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, as "a key part of making work pay", and the government's decision to reassess all incapacity benefit claimants, apart from for those about to reach retirement age, from next week.From next spring, the government's Work Programme would "replace the haphazard mix of Labour schemes that cost billions and never worked" to provide "much better support for those on benefits to get them back into work", he said.The scheme will be administered by private and voluntary organisations.Grayling added: "We'll help people to get back on their feet again. But if they refuse that support, then they will lose their benefits – as simple as that."Conservative conferenceConservativesTax and spendingWelfareChris GraylingPaul Owenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Trial shows prostate drug promise A drug discovered in the UK could help thousands of men with advanced prostate cancer, experts say. bbc.co.uk |
The work of tweeting | Stephanie Merritt Police on Twitter raised eyebrows. If they're like me, those updates could become a full-time jobI had to unfollow Greater Manchester police eventually because they were swamping my timeline, and it's not as if I need any more distraction, but their decision to tweet every 999 call over the course of a day in order to raise public awareness of police work has proved compelling.For those who don't know what any or all of that sentence means, Greater Manchester police decided to publish the details of their day's work on the microblogging site Twitter, where anyone who cares to follow them could see in real time what the forces of law and order were up to. At the same time Twitter user @diaryofaledger was just finishing up a charity "tweetathon", during which he tweeted 40 times an hour for 60 solid hours without sleeping or leaving the house to raise money for autism research. An admirable cause, but if I asked people to give to charity every time I sat glued to Twitter for days on end without getting dressed or eating, there'd be no need for the "big society".Critics of GMP's experiment, including John Humphrys on Today, have questioned the value of police staff tweeting when they should have been out doing the job they're paid to. My literary agent would probably side with Humphrys; he recently declared that 40% of his authors had delivered books late this year, and he blamed this entirely on Twitter. The fact that he posted this lament on Twitter was an irony that didn't go unnoticed but still, it's a serious indictment of the seductive and addictive power of those 140 characters.I've been a late convert to Twitter; when I first heard about it, my response was to sneer loudly. As a child I used to imagine what it would be like if people really had thought bubbles above their heads like in cartoons, and you could see what everyone was thinking all the time. Twitter has made this a reality – but those who dismiss it as a bunch of celebrities over-sharing about their breakfast cereal have never fully engaged with its potential.For any person or organisation whose work involves communicating with the public, there has never been a cheaper or more effective way of reaching people. Protest rallies and petitions are organised through it; journalists and police can appeal for information (a key witness in the Guardian's story about the death of Jimmy Mubenga responded to a journalist's request on Twitter); and any artist can alert fans to new gigs or publications without needing mailing lists or advertising. Depending on who you follow, you can often pick up on news stories from around the world before the mainstream media discover them. Bosses who ban Twitter from office computers might be missing a vital trick if employees need to gather data quickly from a wide range of sources.I love Twitter; maybe too much. I love the fact that people have bought my books because of it and been kind enough to tell me so; I love my strange overlapping networks of interesting people keeping me in touch with their part of the world, and that I have been invited to events and made friends in real life with people I might not otherwise have met.But at the same time I am appalled by how much of my time I allow it to eat. At the time of writing I have posted 7,100 tweets, which at an average of 20 words each is the equivalent of a book casually tossed away into the ether. It was only when I heard myself say to my eight-year-old son, "Hang on, I'm busy," while I finished posting some hilarious aperçu or other, and he replied wearily, "Sometimes, Mum, I think you like Twitter better than me," that I realised it was time to wean myself off. As GMP have demonstrated, Twitter can be an excellent way of engaging with the world around you, but it's no substitute for getting out there and living in it.TwitterBloggingInternetPoliceStephanie Merrittguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'Fake' speed van targets drivers A Cardiff resident, sick of speeding motorists, has come up with a novel way of getting drivers to slow down. bbc.co.uk |
WikiLeaks founder gives news conference in London Julian Assange claims the leaking of hundreds of thousands of top secret US military documents was done in the public interest. telegraph.co.uk |