Echo of Norman Tebbit's 'get on your bike' speech in initiative to encourage people to chase jobs around the country

The government is to launch a "house swap" programme, reminiscent of Norman Tebbit's call for the jobless to "get on your bike", in an attempt to encourage people to move around the country to find work.

The controversial plan to tackle the unemployment crisis means people living in social housing will be helped to uproot their families in order to chase jobs. Details of the scheme are yet to be finalised, but it is understood the plan would involve a nationwide database of house swaps and the removal of any barriers to people in social housing moving between regions.

"House swap" emerged in a week when David Cameron was forced to admit that it was "very disappointing" that unemployment had risen by another 114,000 in the past three months to 2.57 million – a 17-year high. The prime minister added that the government would "do everything it possibly can" to tackle the crisis, amid concerns that ministers do not have any answers to the problem.

The scheme will be launched in the coming weeks. Grant Shapps, the housing minister, wrote in Inside Housing magazine last week that it would "boost the prospects of tenants wanting to swap their social home to take up new job opportunities, be closer to their family, or move to a property better suited to their needs". He added: "Home swap direct will mark the start of a new drive to improve mobility within social housing."

Lord Tebbit, who famously called on the unemployed to "get on your bike" during the Tory party conference in 1981, told the Observer that he fully endorsed the scheme and hoped there would be further moves to promote a mobile workforce. "When I was a young man I needed to be near to Heathrow in order to attend every day the training school there to achieve a flight navigator's licence," he said. "I lived in digs. I did what any rational person would do.

"When I look around I find that an enormous number of jobs are taken here from people who have come from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania. They have moved sometimes over a thousand miles to find a job.

"I read now that no one goes from the east end of London to Kent to go hop picking. They come from central Europe. Anything which can be done to make it easier to move to jobs is obviously a good thing."

However, critics said the scheme added to the impression that the government blamed the lack of mobility among the unemployed for the country's rising joblessness. Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state for work and pensions, caused a furore last year when he suggested the UK's workforce was too "static".

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said: "All the language around getting people back into work has been directed with the implicit message that people aren't prepared to be mobile to find work. But the unemployment figures out this week show that in any category, but particularly if you are young or a woman, there are just no jobs available.

"We are supportive of initiatives which help people move if they want to move, but what the government really needs to be focusing on is creating jobs in our economy rather than cutting them."

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said the focus should be on job creation instead. "Across the country there aren't enough jobs for people to do and most job hunters are going to be understandably reluctant to uproot their families and move hundreds of miles from their support networks," he said. "If the government really wants to help the millions of unemployed, it would come up with a plan B for the economy."

Tony Tom Murtha, chief executive of Midland Heart, one of the country's largest housing associations, added that the new plan along with other initiatives was only "papering over the cracks" and that the government needed to start building more social housing which, through a "virtuous circle", would create jobs.

Karen Buck, Labour shadow work and pensions minister, said she was concerned about the incoherence of the government's policy, which appeared to encourage people in social housing to move to where there were jobs while forcing those with large families out of cities, where most job opportunities lay, by capping their housing benefit.

She said: "Everyone supports measures that help people to take job opportunities, so why are government welfare cuts and council housing allocation policies having the opposite effect by forcing job seekers away from cities where opportunities exist and into the places where unemployment is highest and they are least likely to find work?"