'Hard-core jobless' to get home visits

Twice-weekly attendance at jobcentres and home visits from job advisers will form part of a new crackdown on the "hard-core" unemployed to be unveiled today by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.

In a speech to the Urban Summit in Birmingham, Mr Brown attacks the "destructive culture" of joblessness in a first glimpse of the hardline strategy to be detailed in the pre-Budget report this month.

The joint initiative with Andrew Smith, the Work and Pensions minister, will include mobile jobcentres being sent on to council estates of high unemployment. In a twin-track approach of extra help and extra compulsion, pilot studies will be run in those areas where joblessness has stubbornly refused to fall.

The Chancellor points out that high unemployment areas are often near areas with many vacancies. Tottenham, for example, where 3,500 men are jobless, is next to a jobcentre district with 4,000 vacancies, the Treasury says.

Under the pilot schemes, advisers will hold "street by street" interviews in homes. Claimants currently have to attend jobcentres every two weeks but the new scheme will require them to attend every few days. Literacy and numeracy classes will be offered.

Unemployment is now its lowest in the UK for 25 years and 1.5 million jobs have been created since 1997.

Mr Brown will say: "This will be an onslaught against an unacceptable culture of worklessness that grew up in some of our communities."