Petition Replace Jobseeker's Allowance with a National Job Guarantee

The current system of paying the unemployed to sit at home achieves nothing - JSA should be replaced with a job guarantee, paid at 90% of the minimum wage (to avoid wage inflation) with 35 hours a week of guaranteed work, set hours and 5 weeks of paid holiday each year.

The work could be found either by insourcing previously outsourced unskilled and semi-skilled work, or by work on new infrastructure projects, or by requiring attendance at basic skills training sessions for literacy and numeracy.

JSA currently costs £5bn a year:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/08/uk-benefit-welfare-spending#zoomed-picture

The cost of effectively tripling it would be £10bn - the same figure that was considered so negligible as to make the 50p rate not worth the effort.