THE hard-working taxpayer invests £7.6bn a year in people claiming incapacity benefit. Understandably, the taxpayer wants to make sure that he gets good value for his money.

He does not want to support people who have no intention of ever going back to work, of ever putting anything back into society.

The Government may well be right that some claimants do need a form of compulsion to drive them back into the jobs market. They certainly need all the incentives going to become better trained.

In fact, the Government deserves credit for tackling this most dangerous of territories. As the end of Tony Blair's premiership draws nearer, he seems almost reckless in his determination to take on his own backbenchers and risk defeat.

But before we become too gung-ho about driving the workshy scroungers back into employment amid a climate of insensitivity, we must remember two things.

Firstly, many of these people are genuinely incapacitated. There is nothing they would like better than to be fit and well enough to work. In weeding out the fraudsters, we have to treat the genuine with dignity and understanding.

Secondly, what jobs are there for these people? It is not as if there are thousands of vacancies unfilled in the former mining communities of Durham, which are the incapacity benefit hotspots that will be targeted.

The sun has set on many of the sunrise companies which came into replace the pits, and there are no large scale manufacturing industries coming over the horizon.

So these people will have to travel. But if you are on incapacity benefit of £76-a-week, you are not going to have a car that will carry you miles to work. And you are not going to be able to commute to shift work at odd times of the day and night by relying on rural bus services.

The North-East Labour Party has recognised as much. For the last 15 years, it has been talking about the need to build an East Coast mass transit system of some form. This is to unlock the potential of the communities that have been stranded high and jobless as the coal tide has gone out.

But nothing has been done.

There is merit in using the stick on some people, but you also have to help them to help themselves - and that will require investment.