Today’s Budget contained measures aimed at improving the UK’s skills base, getting people off Incapacity Benefit and back to work, and more help for working parents.
The chancellor announced that the government will spend £65m in the coming year on employer training pilot projects. Gordon Brown also pledged new centres that will offer vocational training.
There will be new rules to encourage incapacity benefit claimants into work and changes to housing benefit to help create jobs.
From next month, there will be £2,000 return to work bonuses available to single parents
Brown also revealed that the first 7,800 civil servants to be moved out of London had now moved to other parts of the UK.
He said the first £2bn of savings from the Gershon review of government departments had been made.
Thirty-five government agencies will be combined into just five – with changes particularly in consumer and trading standards regulators and food inspectorates.
Brown also said he would adopt the Better Regulation Task Force’s call for targets for cutting red tape in every department year by year.
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