I am trying to take my eyes off the Mail’s scoop on Tony Blair giving a £50,000 lecture to toilet roll and disinfectant manufacturers – and instead concentrate on the big issue of the day. That is, Iain Duncan Smith’s plan to make the workless do manual labour in return for their dole money.

It throws up plenty of questions. Namely:

1] How much will it cost to find the work and ensure that claimants are carrying it out? Bear in mind that there are now 1.5m people on Jobseekers’ Allowance. (A total of 5m are on some form of out-of-work allowance, of which 2.5m are on incapacity benefit). If all are put through this system it would surely cost billions of pounds to administrate.

UPDATE: It will only apply to a small minority of claimants. The scheme may prove to be rather symbolic.

2] Will the entire scheme instead only apply to a handful of the unemployed? To quote the Sunday Times: “Job advisers will be given powers to send benefits claimants on placements“. That sounds discretionary rather than universal.

UPDATE: Indeed. The DWP tells me this scheme only applies to those who aren’t trying hard to find a job. “It gives advisers more discretion when someone is not working at trying to find a job,” says a spokeswoman.

3] What kind of work will they be doing? The theory is that each will have to do four weeks of work at 30 hours a week – that is a block of 120 hours’ labour.

UPDATE: The scheme would be carried out by councils, companies, charities and other voluntary groups. Yet none have signed up to the deal or – it seems – even been approached, according to the DWP. It is still very early days as to how this would work, it seems. Don’t be surprised if the scheme ends up in the hands of existing welfare-to-work providers.

4] Will any of this be economically productive? If so, how will they match people’s skills with the requisite work? (It’s a complicated challenge).

5] Will companies be able to take advantage of the unemployed by getting them to work for almost nothing? Does that leave people open to exploitation?

6] Is the scheme as radical as it sounds or do officials already have similar powers?

UPDATE: The latter. “Advisers do have powers in place at the moment, but they are not very widely used,” says the DWP. I’ve done a bit of research and it turns out that Labour’s “Flexible New Deal” – which was around last year – forced people to do ‘four weeks’ work experience’ .

7] If it is not economically productive, will it all be fruitless Keynesian tasks such as litter-picking, digging holes or rolling boulders up hills and back again?

8] Will the policy only apply to those who have been out of work for a certain length of time? If so how long?

UPDATE: Yes, it is aimed at those who show no interest or application in finding a job. But defining such individuals is down to their advisers – which implies a rather arbitrary judgment. Some officials will doubtless be tougher than others.

9] How often will they have to do the hard labour? Once a year? Every six months? Every five years?

UPDATE: It is still not clear

10] Does it only apply to “layabouts” (the phrase in the Sunday Times) and “no-hopers” (News of the World)? Or will the 1m currently in work – but expected to lose their jobs as a direct or indirect result of the spending review – also face the test?

UPDATE: In theory, no, at least not at first.