Under pressure from a relentless and unforgiving webmistress, I am making a cry for help. I’ve been told that all Chief Executives these days must have a “blog” so if anyone knows what they are, where I can get one, and how much they cost, I’d be most grateful.

People engaged in the employability and skills racket can hardly fail to notice that we have been blessed with yet another Welfare Reform Green Paper. As you know, the Government is very worried about the numbers of people still out of work and claiming benefits, so they have come up with a job creation scheme employing hundreds of otherwise unproductive people in writing reports, consultation papers, Green Papers, White Papers, and new legislation, just to keep them off the streets. In the last two years we’ve had “A New Deal for Welfare”, the Freud Report, the Welfare Reform Act, “In Work, Better Off”, “Ready for Work”, “Ready to Work: Skilled for Work”, and now “No One Written Off” - and those are just the ones I can remember.

The general principles of nearly all of these documents are hard to disagree with: A balance of rights and responsibilities; people should generally be better off in work; worklessness is bad for your mental and physical health; the economy needs everyone to improve their skills and contribute. However, there are still some rather obvious truths that are being missed in all this flurry of paper:

• Coercion tends to be less effective than positive support and incentives.

• Too many new initiatives and policy changes, however worthy, merely confuse and demoralise those responsible for implementing them

• What moves large numbers of people into work is not rigid micromanaged programmes like the New Deals, but a growing and successful economy.

• Do we detect a mismatch between the rhetoric that blames youth crime and antisocial behaviour on parental neglect, and the policy that may force parents back to work when their youngest child is seven years old?

Don’t mind me - I’m getting old and cynical. And by the way, we genuinely welcome the move towards devolving employment support to non-statutory agencies such as Wheatsheaf who have pioneered many of the most successful methods of helping people back into work and are able to reach the most disadvantaged social groups.

Remember, if anyone comes across a good second-hand blog going for a reasonable price, I’m in the market.

JC