The short answer is: yes and no. Reading this piece about Elizabeth Malcolm on the BBC website is perplexing. On the one hand it’s hard to understand how a woman of 43 could have spent her entire adult life without mustering the necessary enthusiasm to ‘get around to’ getting a job; reading that is frustrating and annoying, especially when she concludes “give me a job and I’ll work” as if jobs just sort of turn up for the rest of us. On the other hand it’s a quite depressing portrait of a life filled with anxiety and fear – that deserves support, not censure.

Leaving school disillusioned and disenfranchised with no qualifications to speak of, Elizabeth didn’t have enough confidence to even check if she could join the army based on the general impression school and life had given her that she wasn’t very bright. She stumbled into a relationship, had a child young, and then more children, only now arriving back in a situation where the money threatens to run out and the new income support reforms are sending her forcibly to the Job Centre.

I didn’t expect to have a great deal of sympathy for Elizabeth, but the more I realised how little self-esteem or sense of worth this woman had, the more I realised she was unlikely to get a job, no matter how many interviews she attended, in her current state.

It’s not a lack of skills, but a state of mind. She is interested in a caring profession, and could have been volunteering for some time now to build up her confidence and get used to a work environment for the first time, but of course this has never occurred to her because she has been led to just letting things come to her instead of going for them.

With the right kind of support – volunteer placements, accessible low-cost training schemes – I don’t believe it would take very much time, effort or money to get Elizabeth into work. The problem is that this kind of issue is inherited, and it seems that at least one of Elizabeth’s children has taken the attitude to the extreme.

Says Danielle, 17, (who also cares for her son Rhys, 11 months):

"All my pals are looking for work as well. But it's not that easy to get a job straightaway, you've got to write out your CV and everything and then hand it in to places."

Well, yes, love. That’s how it works for everyone.

She dreams of being a beautician but goes on to say that she has a dull life just sitting at home all day. How can she not put two and two together and spend that lonely time working towards her goals? I have less patience for Danielle’s unemployment than her mother’s, in part because of her age and in part because I think if you feel you’re old enough to have a child then you’re old enough to take some responsibility for paying for them, even if it’s part-time work that you can build upon later.

For the record, I have no problem with being a stay-at-home mum at all – my mum was one, and I’d probably consider it if I didn’t like my job as much as I do – but you do need to step up to the plate and take some financial responsibility, as well as setting a good example for your kids.

So why is the government only now waking up to the fact that it was a massive waste of time to try and get thousands of students into university every year just so that they could say they could, when they should have been finding ways to nurture talent, ability and aptitude in non-academic subject as well?

Sadder than Danielle’s focus-free existence, however, is that of her brother, William. Despite Army success and several deployments to war zones, he has fallen into the path of alcoholism, depression and agoraphobia, and could desperately do with therapy to get him back on his feet, being the only one who has shown a serious inclination to work; not only that, but to do a job precious few – myself included – would want to.

So, back to the answer to my question. No, there’s no excuse, because even the most unlucky person could have found something to do in that time. And yes, there is an excuse, which is that if you can’t help yourself, you can’t help anyone else either.

We’ve helped these people survive by throwing money at them. Now let’s put this money to good use in training them. Only if they resist that and truly show themselves to be genuinely shiftless and lazy do we need to cut off the cash and frogmarch them to Job Centre. Many complain about paying for the unemployed, but it’s the price we pay for shutting our eyes to the issues that keep these people locked up in their own minds.