David Cameron is set to unveil plans for a radical overhaul of the benefits system designed to end the culture of welfare dependency and get the growing army of unemployed back into work.
On the eve of the party's annual conference in Manchester, Mr Cameron said Labour's flagship New Deal welfare-to-work programme would be scrapped and replaced with a new Get Britain Working plan.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, he said a Conservative government would dismantle Labour's "big government labyrinth" and simplify the system to provide more personalised support for people seeking work.
"The urgency of this crisis and the scale of the suffering is why we're putting this problem - and our solution - front and centre at our conference," he said.
"We won't get Britain back to work through Labour's big government solutions. It is big government that has stifled innovation and crushed enterprise - the very engines of growth and job creation."
In a separate article for the News of the World he described the Tories' proposals as "the biggest shake-up in welfare for 60 years".
"It is vital that we get to grips with this problem. It's not just that it comes with a price-tag of tens of billions a year. It's that mass unemployment can lead to massive social problems - like family breakdown and crime - and that affects us all," he said.
"A crisis of this scale, that runs so deep, cannot be solved with one policy or programme alone. It means ripping up the old way of doing things and bringing radical change across the whole of our economy."
Tory sources said that it would be a comprehensive package to tackle long-term unemployment and reduce the cost to the taxpayer of the 2.6 million people currently on incapacity benefit.
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It is reported to include American-style measures to use private firms - who are paid by results - prepare people for employment and place them in jobs.
