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" Lord Alan Sugar has slammed the &amp;quot;cushy&amp;quot; benefits system in the UK for discouraging people from work. Speaking at the launch of Young Apprentice, the businessman criticised the previous Labour government for &amp;quot;the benefits systems and the so-called apprenticeship schemes&amp;quot; that he claimed were used to move people &amp;quot;out of the number crunching&amp;quot; of unemployment figures.   &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s too much of a culture that exists out there, what I call an expectancy culture, of things being provided,&amp;quot; Sugar said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m afraid to say that the goody-goody benefits system we have in this system has made it a bit too cushy for people. &amp;quot;Now it&amp;#039;s a kind of wake-up call. Not everybody needs to go to university, they can get out and start working straight away.&amp;quot; &amp;amp;gt; Young Apprentice 2012 candidates unveiled by Lord Alan Sugar&amp;amp;gt; Young Apprentice 2012: Meet the candidates - In Pictures He added: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve gone through an era in the early &amp;#039;00s and late &amp;#039;90s where the young people have these targets and want to start up there... they&amp;#039;re not interested in dirtying their hands down here. &amp;quot;They want to be a dot com, they want to go to venture capitalists, they want someone to give them money, they want the bank to give them money because they have an idea. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s all gone. It&amp;#039;s finished. That era is over. We&amp;#039;ve got to put that message across. You have got to start down there.&amp;quot; Sugar was offered a peerage and made an &amp;#039;enterprise tsar&amp;#039; by former prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009, though he described the role as &amp;quot;politically neutral&amp;quot; at the time. Karren Brady, one of Sugar&amp;#039;s two aides on the show, said: &amp;quot;With a bit of energy, a spark of an idea, some absolute determination, you can start something from nothing. &amp;quot;When we talk to young people, that&amp;#039;s what they say they&amp;#039;ve taken from the first series [of Junior Apprentice]. It&amp;#039;s certainly the message.&amp;quot; Sugar said: &amp;quot;We want to try and show that you can start something from nothing and get away from this culture of university, then go on a gap year for two years, then get a job at some consultancy and then go on the dole.&amp;quot; Watch some of Lord Alan Sugar&amp;#039;s classic lines from The Apprentice below:      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/showbiz/the-apprentice/news/a346031/lord-alan-sugar-slams-cushy-benefits-system/>