Council house tenants should get a job, says the poverty czar

Naomi Eisenstadt, who heads the Government's social exclusion taskforce, said officials should routinely tell new tenants: "You might want to think about finding work."

Her comments came in the wake of figures which show that just one in three heads of such households has a job.

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The number in full-time employment - just over one in five - has fallen since Labour came to power in 1997.

American-born Miss Eisenstadt, formerly a senior adviser to education ministers, was picked to launch the taskforce just under a year ago.

The organisation is intended to find ways to help the estimated 140,000 families in Britain who are judged to be deprived.

Miss Eisenstadt told the journal of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies: "What we are trying to do is make sure that the public sector sees people in the whole and sees families in the whole."

There was a 'failure of housing and employment to join up', she added.

"So you go to the housing office and they sort out your housing problems, but do they ever say to you, you might want to think about finding work?" she said.

"Opportunities to pick up problems through universal services are often missed."

Housing expert Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said the problem was that working families were seen as being in less need of subsidised housing than the jobless.

"The rule ought to be that getting a council flat is conditional on the tenant being in work," he said.

"Social housing was originally intended to help the low-paid working classes. Now it is mainly a benefit for the non-working classes.

"Council houses are handed out on the basis of who is thought to have the greatest need.

"Working people no longer get a look-in because they cannot score highly enough on the needs scale.

"The result is that social housing is being used to help people who do not work but sponge off the rest of us."

Miss Eisenstadt's remarks will fuel the debate on whether those who are dependent on benefits should be pushed towards finding jobs.

David Cameron has said that a Tory government would put pressure on the 2.7million who claim incapacity benefit to get back into work.

But Labour has declined to follow the example set by Bill Clinton's administration in the 1990s, when single mothers were told their benefits would stop after a set time period unless they found jobs.

Figures given to MPs last week show that when the Government came to power in 1997, some 30 per cent of heads of households in social housing had jobs.

Of these, 23 per cent worked fulltime and 7 per cent part-time. By last year that had become 22 per cent and 9 per cent.

The increase in part-time work could be a result of Gordon Brown's complex tax credit system.

There are 3,864,000 council and housing association homes in Britain, each one built and rented out at an average subsidy from the taxpayer of £62,000.

More than 3million of these homes have a head of household who does not have a full-time job.