Unveiling the Welfare Reform Bill to Parliament, Cameron said: "Never again will work be the wrong financial choice. Welfare has to change because it isn’t working. A working welfare system should be about training, confidence and getting back into work."
Currently, government is spending one in every seven pounds it receives on welfare, he said, and one in four adults of working age are out of work. "Reform is not just an economic necessity, it is a moral necessity," Cameron said.
Speaking this morning, he talked about the need to restore the culture of respect for work and ensure people take responsibility. He unveiled changes intended to simplify the system, introduce tougher sanctions and limits on what unemployed people receive in benefits and build a welfare-to-work progranme that is more responsive to people’s individual needs.
"It is undeniably tough, certainly radical, but more importantly fair. Too often people are trapped in a fog of dependency. Time and again in the existing system the rational thing for people to do is the wrong thing," the prime minister said.
Cameron added that he wanted people in work to stay "fit, healthy and productive", noting that half the people in long-term unemployment began by being signed off sick.
"We need to get to grips with the sick note culture," he said, announcing that he has asked national director for health and work, Dame Carol Black and British Chambers of Commerce director general David Frost to review sickness absence.
Cameron also confirmed that social enterprises, charities and private companies would be invited to deliver individual welfare-to-work programmes in order to "sweep away the bureaucracy that makes people feel like numbers in a machine".
In response to criticism that public sector cuts make it difficult for the third sector to bid for such contracts, he stressed: "These will not just be big companies."
He added that the new approach would be funded by the savings these companies achieve.
"We will pay these organisations by results. We will withhold payment until they get people into work and these people stay in work."
