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Sickness benefits could be slashed by as much as £30 per week under leaked Tory plans, hitting thousands of disabled and sick jobseekers.

A leaked document outlines plans to remove part of the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) which is paid to sick and disabled people who are preparing to look for work.

Claimants in the 'work related activity group' (WRAG) can currently claim up to £102.15 a week - which would drop by £30 to bring it in line with Jobseekers' Allowance.

People not considered fit for work can claim up to £109.30 a week.

It means sick and disabled jobseekers would not get any more financial support while preparing to return to work than other jobseekers.

It comes just days after the Independent Living Fund - relied on by thousands of disabled people - was scrapped.

The fund was handed to local councils, but only a handful said they would ringfence the money, leaving many vulnerable people facing an uncertain future.

And just yesterday Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith announced government targets for raising children out of poverty would be scrapped - a move described as the "obituary notice of compassionate conservatism."

(Image: Getty)

The document says the WRAG top up does not "incentivise" people to seek work - adding that scrapping it would give people less reason to worry about getting the "wrong" result from a work capability test.

The assessments too would see a shake up under the proposals.

The Work Capability Assessment would be renamed "Employment Capability Assessments", to "focus attention on work seeking, not benefit seeking."

Tests would also be reorganised to focus on what candidates could do, rather than what they can't do - and be carried out earlier in the application process.

The document is marked "not government policy" - but according to the BBC, the proposals are still under consideration.

It was revealed last month that the number of ESA claimants subject to sanctions had almost doubled.

In 2014, the Department for Work and Pensions dished out 75 sanctions for every 1,000 WRAG claimants.

A year earlier, the rate was 40 sanctions for every 1,000 claimants, according to figures analysed by Trinity Mirror's data unit.

George Osborne has to make £12bn in as-yet unannounced cuts to benefits in order to meet his deficit reduction targets.

The paper claims abolishing the WRAG top-up will save the government "hundreds of millions of pounds" by the end of the decade.

A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions said: "This is speculation based on documents leaked before the election. We do not comment on leaked documents."