SDLP Social Development Minister Alex Attwood has said he was concerned about plans to radically reform the UK's benefits system.
On Friday, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith pledged the most sweeping changes in decades in a drive to simplify the structure and make work pay.
He gave a critical account of the complex welfare system, which he said had helped create ghettos of worklessness, often affecting generations of families.
Mr Duncan Smith said he wants to unify the disparate elements that form the benefits structure as well as rectifying the "illogical" position of benefits paying more than work.
Options include combining elements of the current income-related benefits and tax credit systems, bringing out-of-work and in-work support together in a single system, and supplementing monthly household earnings through credit payments reflecting circumstances such as children, housing and disability.
Mr Duncan Smith said five million people are on out-of-work benefits, with a "staggering" 1.4 million on benefits for nine or more of the last 10 years, while the UK has one of the highest rates of workless households in Europe.
One in six children will grow up in a workless household, said the minister, adding that up to three generations of the same family are growing up with no work in their lives.
"The benefits system has created pockets of worklessness, where idleness has become institutionalised. The welfare budget is spiralling out of control, up from £63bn in 1996-97 to £87bn in 2009-10, although the actual increase was £61bn in the last 10 years", Mr Duncan Smith said.
"The key must be to break the cycle of dependency. We must make sure that work pays, even for the poorest."
The system cost £3.5bn to administer, while a further £5bn was lost in fraud or errors, which were "staggering" amounts.
"These proposals will go for consultation but with a major health warning from me," Mr Attwood said on Friday.
Last week he met Welfare Reform Minister Lord Freud and argued that Northern Ireland had particular circumstances, including high levels of deprivation and the impact of the conflict on people's lives and experience.
"These factors, the character of proposed reforms and the fact that Northern Ireland will remain in recession until the end of 2012 at least, all means Northern Ireland needs both time out from yet more welfare reform and maximum flexibility around welfare benefits," the SDLP minister added.
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