Young people who refuse to take up jobs or training will lose their benefits in the government’s crackdown on worklessness, Liz Kendall has said.

The work and pensions secretary said on Sunday: “If people repeatedly refuse to take up the training or work responsibilities, there will be sanctions on their benefits.”

Asked on Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips if this meant losing those benefits, Kendall replied: “Yes.”

Ministers are preparing to announce sweeping changes to the welfare system and out-of-work support next week. It forms part of a drive to get more people into work and cut the government’s welfare bill, which has ballooned since the Covid crisis.

“The reason why we believe this so strongly is that we believe in our responsibility to provide those new opportunities, which is what we will do,” Kendall told Sky. “We will transform those opportunities, but young people will be required to take them up, just as they did in the late 1990s with the new deal for young people, and the late noughties with the future jobs fund, because it is so damaging for young people not to have skills or not to be in work.”

Kendall added: “I do not want an ever increasing benefits bill spent on the cost of failure, people trapped out of work, terrible for their life chances, and paid for by the taxpayer.”

She said there were nearly a million young people – one in eight – who were not in education, employment or training.

Asked on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg whether there were people who could work but did not work, Kendall said: “Yes.”

She said: “I know from speaking to our job coaches, our fantastic job coaches in jobcentres, that there are people who could work, who aren’t. But I think they are in the minority.”

Kendall said some people who were out of work had “self-diagnosed” mental health problems, though she stressed there was a “genuine problem with mental health in this country”.

She set out plans to overhaul apprenticeships and jobcentres in an attempt to reduce the number of people who are out of work.

In an interview with the Observer, Kendall said jobcentres had become a hollowed-out “benefit administration service” that was no longer “fit for purpose” and was being shunned by employers and jobseekers alike.

“Employers are desperate to recruit,” she told the Observer. “People are desperate to earn money and get on in their jobs. So we need big change. We need to see change in our jobcentres from a one-size-fits-all benefit administration service to a genuine public employment service.”

In an article in the Mail on Sunday, Keir Starmer vowed to “get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society” in “the biggest overhaul of employment support in memory”.

But he promised not to “call people shirkers or go down the road of division” and said that instead ministers would “treat people with dignity and respect”.

“Next week, my government will set out radical reforms to get Britain working. No more business as usual,” the prime minister wrote. “And don’t get me wrong, we will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters. There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals.”