A government scheme which aims to get disabled people into work in York and throughout the region is to be launched in North Yorkshire.

The county has been chosen as one of 12 pilot areas to spearhead the project drawn up under the Government's latest welfare reforms.

Under the New Deal for Disabled People, a personal adviser will contact those on incapacity benefit and draw up an employability assessment and action plan to get them into work.

Social Security Secretary, Harriet Harman, said it would offer a lifeline to more than one million people because employment offered the best route out of poverty.

"We inherited a situation where people with disabilities or long- term illness were written off - that was wrong," she said.

"People do not want to be condemned to a life on benefit it they are able to participate in the labour market, even if this is only to a limited extent.

"There are over a million sick and disabled people without jobs who want to work."

The Government will trial the New Deal, which it claims removes the disincentives and financial risk from taking a job, in a total of 12 areas from October.

The new measures include:

Former claimants of incapacity benefit who are forced to leave their new job within a year through illness or disability will still be eligible for benefit

The rule limiting unpaid voluntary work to 16 hours a week for those on incapacity benefit will be abolished

Benefit rules will be changed to allow people on incapacity benefit to undertake work for a trial period and still earn up to £15 while on benefit

A Disabled Person's Tax Credit will be brought in to replace the Disability Working Allowance

Financial incentives to work which are currently only available to the unemployed will be extended to the disabled, these include the Jobmatch payment of £50 for those moving into part-time work and a Jobfinder's Grant of £200 for those starting work.

Lilian Parkinson, co-ordinator of York Disability Rights and Resources Centre, said she welcomed the new proposals. Fear of losing the higher level of benefit had been a real concern for those receiving invalidity benefit. " Certainly these proposals are extremely positive," she said.

"We would hope they are the beginning of an approach which is going to be much more imaginative and much more flexible than anything we have had in the past.

"But the majority of people we see are older people of 50 and more and it is not necessarily lack of opportunity that stops them working but lack of suitable work, the gentler jobs seem to have gone."

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