'On your bus', says Iain Duncan Smith - and David Cameron tells the jobless he's right

• Iain Duncan Smith was making the case for 'flexible working'

Downing Street said that Mr Duncan Smith was making the case for "flexible" working patterns and underlining that people had to be "active" when they look for work.

Mr Duncan Smith's remarks drew a furious response from union leaders and opposition politicians, who accused the minister of a "calculated insult" just days after Chancellor George Osborne unveiled the most severe set of cuts seen since the Second World War.

His comments carried echoes of Norman Tebbit's infamous suggestion during the downturn of the 1980s that the unemployed should follow the example of the Tory grandee's father and get on their bikes to find work.

The government has acknowledged that almost 500,000 public sector workers are set to lose their jobs as a result of the cuts set out in Chancellor George Osborne's spending review on Wednesday.

Interviewed on the BBC2's Newsnight last night, Mr Duncan Smith said: "The truth is there are jobs. They may not be absolutely in the town you are living in. They may be in a neighbouring town."

He pointed to Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, as an example of a place where people had become "static" and "didn't know if they got on the bus, an hour's journey they'd be in Cardiff and they could look for the job there".

He added: "We need to recognise the jobs often don't come to you. Sometimes you need to go to the jobs."

Mr Duncan Smith said that "in fairness" to those on low incomes who pay taxes to support the disadvantaged, people on unemployment benefit should "make some reasonable effort to get work".

Downing Street said that the Work and Pensions Secretary had simply been making the case for flexible labour markets, of which Prime Minister was "in favour".

"He was making a very fair point, which most people recognise, about how it's important to have flexible labour markets and that people are encouraged to be active in looking for work," the Prime Minister's official spokesman said.

When he made his point, Mr Duncan Smith insisted that jobs were available "fairly evenly" up and down the country and said that around 450,000 jobs were on show every week within job centres.

The latest figures for Scotland suggest that there are 28,827 vacancies being advertised in job centres north of the Border.

When broken down by local authority area, the most vacancies are in Glasgow City where there are 3,882 vacancies. Scotland's largest city is closely followed by Edinburgh with 3,658. Aberdeen is next with 1,823, with North Lanarkshire (1,800), South Lanarkshire (1,713), Highland (1,705) and Fife (1,471) coming up behind.

Those figures, however, are some way behind unemployment figures for the same areas. Total unemployment in Scotland is 129,964 when using the claimant count measure of joblessness - the number of people claiming unemployment related benefits.

Claimant count in Glasgow is 24,844 and in Edinburgh it is 10,014. North Lanarkshire has 10,812 unemployed, South Lanarkshire 8,357, the Highlands 3,275 and Fife 9,793.

Mr Duncan Smith's were met with anger from trades unionists. Unite assistant general secretary Len McCluskey saying they showed that the Tories remained the "nasty party".

"Can the ConDem coalition really believe that the unemployment being created by savage government cuts will be fixed by having people wandering across the country with their meagre possessions crammed into the luggage racks of buses?" he said.

Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport union, said: "This rubbish from the old-school Thatcherite right is nothing less than a calculated insult to the 500,000 public sector workers who stand to lose their jobs from the cuts."

A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services union said that Mr Duncan Smith's remarks gave the lie to his attempts to reinvent himself as a "caring Conservative".

"It didn't take long for the mask to slip and for him to reveal himself as a Tebbit clone with this disgusting insult that is part of the coalition's attempt to cast vulnerable members of our society as the new deserving and undeserving poor," the spokesman said.

Unite national officer Graham Stevenson said that Mr Duncan Smith's remarks came as government cuts meant that bus services were in decline. "Iain Duncan Smith is callously telling people to get on a bus to look for a job but the Tories are actually cutting bus services," he said.

For Labour, shadow work and pensions secretary Douglas Alexander said that people could not make the move from welfare to work if the jobs were not available.

"Like Norman Tebbit before him, Iain Duncan Smith seems sadly to have retreated into the Conservative comfort zone of blame and disdain," he said.