Council house tenants to be offered help to move to find work

By Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent Published: 6:13PM GMT 03 March 2010

John Healey, the Housing Minister, pronounced that the Government longed for to assistance the "squeezed middle" of tenants who were in work but earning low wages.

Low-paid workers have been between the misfortune strike by the recession, with some-more than half saying a tumble in income as a outcome of marked down hours, less overtime and salary cuts.

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Under the home-finding scheme, residents with an suggest of work outward their internal area will be helped to find affordable place to live closer to their new job.

The �1.2 million intrigue will run initial in the north east, north west and Yorkshire, prior to being lengthened to the rest of the country. Ministers envision around 10,000 people could be helped.

Mr Healey said: "Social tenants can mostly find it formidable to prepare a move to a new amicable home. So currently Im rising a new home-finding scheme, so tenants with pursuit offers can feel improved means to take them up but worrying about where they will live."

But Grant Shapps, the shade housing spokesman, said: "At the impulse it"s far as well formidable to be means to move around the republic in sequence to accept work, but what the Minister has voiced currently is usually a waste answer to a most bigger problem."

The proclamation comes as Tim Leunig, an mercantile historian, launches a paper for the 20:20 think tank, in that he argues that councils should stop on condition that amicable housing.

Instead, all legislature tenants would be speedy to turn owners occupiers, with mortgages done some-more affordable around a recover of land for new home building.

In the pamphlet, called Low residence prices and owners occupation: a improved pick to amicable housing, Mr Leunig said: "If as a republic we confirm that we wish housing to be some-more affordable so that the cost is simpler for people and multitude to afford, afterwards we can do it.

"We simply have to recover a befitting apportion of land for housing.

"If we do so we will usually revoke the border of overcrowding, and dark and pithy homelessness. The watchful lists for housing will come down. The series of people with troublingly high mortgages will additionally tumble over time, shortening the border to that they are exposed to the mercantile cycle.

"And taxpayers will be much, most improved off given the cost of on condition that housing for those who cannot means it will be far lower. Is sacrificing a small proportion, a couple of per cent, of the panorama unequivocally as well high a cost to compensate to all that?"