'Real reform' Kendall puts stress on skills and trust

The welfare secretary, Liz Kendall, is wearing an apron and gingerly rolling a ball of sourdough. When it comes to getting people off incapacity benefits and back into work, breadmaking, it seems, has a part to play.

- Patrick Butler

Kendall is at Workbridge, a community centre in Northampton. There's a cafe, a garden centre and workshops and kitchens offering people with mental illness, autism, learning disabilities and brain injuries the chance to develop their life and job skills.

People referred to Workbridge are often taking their first, tentative steps towards a job or returning to work. The activities - art, wood-turning, ceramics, breadmaking - are therapeutic, about building confidence, routine and trust.

On her visit last month, Kendall was keen to highlight the less-discussed aspects of Labour's ambitious employment plan, Get Britain Working, but the visit came against a backdrop of political noise around the government's cuts to incapacity benefits.

The benefit system was broken, said Kendall. She said she wanted to replace the idea of the jobcentre as a place of distrust and punishment with one that provided real help to people on incapacity benefits, many of whom say they want to work.