Jobless face skills tests

Many people need help to improve their basic skills

The unemployed will have to sit tests to assess their skills under a new scheme to be revealed by the Chancellor Gordon Brown.

The "skills audit" is part of Labour's plans to make full employment in the UK the centrepiece of its election manifesto, Mr Brown will announce on Saturday.

Under the plans, anyone unemployed for six months will be required to undergo assessments - including reading and writing tests - to identify skills gaps which are preventing them from getting jobs.

Testing will be voluntary for single parents and the disabled.

Mr Brown is expected to say that the audits will be linked to guaranteed training places, many of which are hoped to be provided by computer companies, with whom he is currently in talks.

'Opportunity and prosperity for all'

The aim will be to help the companies solve the UK's information technology skills gap which has seen them look overseas for workers, while giving the jobless the prospect of highly-paid employment in the future, he will say.

Details of the £8m scheme, due to start in April, will be revealed by Mr Brown in a speech at a top union dinner in London.

He will tell an audience of trade unionists that Labour's economic policy for the next five years will be guided by the principle of "opportunity and prosperity for all" with the aim of creating a society in which everyone is given the chance to work their way to a better life.

In the speech, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, the chancellor will stress the need to create a "work-your-way-up economy, where we do not only create opportunities and responsibilities for full employment, but for people to have the skills to have high-income jobs".

"We will propose in our election manifesto measures to end long-term unemployment in our country and to make progress in doing so in each region," he will add.

'Gimmick'

The first stage of the government's New Deal scheme had achieved its aim of moving 250,000 jobless people off welfare and into work, and new targets now need to be set for the scheme, Mr Brown is due to say.

Between 2001 and 2004, the focus would shift to helping the unemployed gain new skills, and rewarding those who take the responsibility for acquiring the skills they need.

But Shadow Employment Secretary Theresa May dismissed the skills audit scheme as "just another government gimmick to grab headlines".

"Someone who is long-term unemployed needs help to find work, not tests," she said.