Brown pledges help for homebuyers

Gordon Brown moved aggressively on to Conservative election territory yesterday when he linked negative equity and soaring interest rates of the Thatcher-Major era with the threat to affordable housing from Oliver Letwin's promised spending freeze.

Contrasting Labour's doubling of housing investment - to £7.2bn by 2007-08 - with the £19bn backlog of repairs inherited in 1997, the chancellor warned: "Today's Conservative party would make exactly the same mistakes" by cutting the housing budget by £800m if Mr Letwin moved into the Treasury.

Mr Brown joined forces with John Prescott to back the deputy prime minister's agenda to promote wider home ownership, especially for young, first-time buyers, and help generate a million more owner-occupiers by 2010 - 75% of all households compared with 70% today.

Unveiling a new poster at Westminster, under the slogan: "Interest rates halved with Labour. Don't let the Tories put your mortgage at risk," the two men warned that Mr Letwin's promise to protect health and educational spending had to mean immediate cuts "from day one" in budgets such as housing to finance promised tax cuts.

"This is part of plans to make massive cuts in public spending from day one, £7bn in the first year rising to £12bn, then £16bn, then £22bn, then £27bn, ending up with a cut of £35bn by 2011-12," Mr Brown said.

The chancellor refuses to budge from Labour's agreed campaign script despite complaints that Mr Letwin's £35bn figure is not a cut, but a reduced increase. In practice, it will mean the same, ministers insist.

In a blatant reference to the first postwar consumer boom of his own childhood, Mr Brown cited Harold Macmillan's talk in 1957 of a "property-owning democracy" at a time when only 30% of Britons owned their home. Macmillan's pledge to build 300,000 houses a year helped propel him to the post of Tory prime minister .

"In 2005 it is time to see the future of Britain as a wealth-owning democracy where assets are owned by all, making Britain a beacon for the world," Mr Brown said. He said average interest rates of 5.2% since 1997 were half the average of the Tory years, when they hit a high of 15%.

To illustrate their point, the chancellor and the deputy prime minister later visited Amanda Steaman, 25, and her partner Ben Packer, 23, at their one-bedroom £155,000 flat in Crawley, West Sussex. Purchased in a "shared equity" scheme with a housing association, the couple's mortgage costs them £177.60 a month.

Getting young couples on modest incomes - and without the middle-class option of help from parents and family - on the housing ladder in the property-rich south-east is part of Labour's attempt to redress "asset inequality" which deepens the social divide.

Mr Prescott wants to build 15,000 new shared-equity homes on 100 brownfield sites vacated by the NHS; to promote a new range of £60,000 starter-homes; and to boost rented accommodation which experts say is an even more pressing social need, though electorally less urgent.

Yesterday the Big Voice Tour, a lobby group for the homeless, warned that the government must invest more in low-cost rental properties for single people while FirstRungNow welcomed growing support for shared equity but also said ministers should have done more sooner.

The Conservatives' spokes woman, Caroline Spelman, also accused Labour of belated interest on the eve of an election and as a "rigged revaluation" of property threatens higher council tax rates.

Michael Howard, suffering a croaky throat for the second day running, joined John Redwood, his spokesman on deregulation, to promote the Tory pledge to cut 11,000 pages of regulations and 1,300 central government targets.

The Conservative plans include simpler rules on money laundering, which are "too burdensome for the law-abiding citizen", fewer speed cameras, and even a five minute grace period for motorists to find a working ticket machine before being fined for illegal parking.

Mr Redwood told a Westminster press conference: "When teachers try to teach, nurses try to nurse, small businesses try to serve their clients and the police try to arrest criminals, there is always a regulator or three breathing down their necks."