300,000 perpetually jobless homes in UK

London: The number of homes where no one has ever worked has doubled in little more than a decade.

There are now nearly 300,000 homes where no one has had a job in their lives, and more than 300,000 children living in families where no one knows what it is like to go out to work.

These numbers have more than doubled in the years since Labour came to power. However, in a welcome development, the number of homes where no one is currently working has fallen.

There are now 3.88 million such homes, excluding pensioners.

Although they make up almost one in five of all homes in the country, there are 38,000 fewer workless homes than at this time last year.

Ministers acknowledged that the figures published yesterday show a "huge" rate of welfare dependency, and that efforts to encourage hundreds of thousands who have lost the habit of work into looking for jobs have yet to have any effect.

Employment minister Chris Grayling said: "While the slight fall in the numbers of workless households and children living in workless households is encouraging, these figures still underline the sheer scale of the challenge we face.

Lifetime on benefits

"Over the last decade thousands of people were simply abandoned to a lifetime on benefits, and a staggering 1.84 million children are living in homes where currently no one works." At the heart of the picture of benefit dependency and feckless families painted by the figures from the Office for National Statistics are the homes where no one has worked in their lives.

Surveys on which the ONS based its figures do not count the numbers of individuals involved. But there are likely to be around 700,000 men, women and children who have no everyday experience of anyone going out to work.

— Daily Mail