Iain Duncan Smith’s proposals to encourage the long-term unemployed to move to areas where there are better job opportunities has been greeted with a mixed response.
But it does shine a spotlight on a major problem for many social housing tenants – the difficulty for people to move within the social housing sector. In a recent survey conducted by our House Exchange service, the UK’s only not-for-profit mutual exchange service for social housing tenants, almost 10 per cent of people looking for a house swap cited employment as their reason for wanting to move.
There is a will among many people to relocate for work, but in the absence of a nationwide house exchange scheme that all landlords are obliged to sign up to, we will struggle to create the fluid, free-market of house exchanges that would help so many people.
The government has highlighted the problem – we hope it also encourages and enables the right solution.
David Williams, executive director, Circle Anglia
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