After widespread confusion on the first day the new 420€ unemployment benefit was put into operation, the government has promised to provide more information and open it up to include the most needy.

According to José Blanco, Minister for Public Works, stated today that people needed to understand that 'as for everything else' claimants had to fulfil certain requirements before being eligible for the benefit.

Employment offices struggled with the unexpectedly massive demand for the benefit and manycomplained that the information about it was 'poor' and there was a great deal of 'anger' amongst members of the public, many of whom had not understood that the benefit was only forpeople whose benefit had expired on August 1st.

It was also not made clear initially that those eligible for the aid would not actually receive any money until September 10th.  Many offices have still not received the forms to hand out to people applying for the government help.

The secretary general of the PP, María Dolores de Cospedal, described the introduction of thenew benefit as a 'fraud' by president Zapatero and his government, describing it as 'an insult to those who are having the hardest time of all at the moment'.

Trade Unions have also called for the benefit to be made available to a wider group of people, including those who have been unable to claim benefit since January.  They claim that only 3% of unemployed will be eligible for the benefit. Zapatero has today promised to hold talks with the trade unions to this end.

IU LV-CA general director, Diego Valderas, has also added his voice to the criticism, saying that it was 'immoral' that the government had 'allocated more than 150,000 million euros to bail out the private banking sector, which caused the recession in the first place, and only 640 million to people who are out of work and who have no income at all.'

Jordi Guillot, vice-president of the ICV, described the new benefit as an 'inadequate patch' and lamented the fact that it was 'exclusive and discriminative against more than two thirds of the unemployed who receive nothing.'