Goverment Support Low Employment Areas

Gordon Brown has pledged £1 billion to create 100,000 jobs for young people and another 50,000 in areas of high unemployment.

Unveiling the Government's legislative plans for the year to the next election, the Prime Minister announced a number of wide-ranging reforms that he said would boost employment and give people greater guarantees on public service standards.

Mr Brown said as the Government sought to move the economy out of recession, it was setting out steps to support growth and jobs.

"In the last two recessions tens of thousands of young people were written off to become a generation lost to work - a mistake this Government will not repeat."

The new initiatives will be paid for from spending allocations made in the Budget and from "switches in spending" to meet new priorities.

Starting from January, every young person under 25 unemployed for a year or more will receive a guaranteed job, work experience or training place. But they will have an "obligation" to accept that guaranteed offer.

Mr Brown said: "This is the first time that any Government has guaranteed that jobs and training will be available to young people and, crucially, has made it mandatory for young people that, if there is a job available, to take this work up and have their benefits cut if they do not."

He added: "In total .... we are preventing the loss of around 500,000 jobs."

Promising not to "walk away from the British people during difficult times," he said an Energy Bill would support up to four commercial scale carbon capture and storage demonstration plants.

There would be a £150 million "innovation fund" for biotechnology, life sciences, low carbon technologies and advanced technologies, that would lever-up £1 billion in private sector investment.

Mr Brown said the Government would also treble investment in housing to £2.1 billion.

But Tory leader David Cameron dismissed the plans as "top-down bureaucratic tinkering".

He said there was no "price tag" on the package and asked when somebody would tell the Prime Minister that he had "run out of money".

In what amounted to a mini-manifesto, designed to establish clear blue water between Labour and the Conservatives, Mr Brown said the Government would legislate in the next session to remove the last hereditary peers from the Lords.

A Bill would also provide for the disqualification of peers "where there is reason to do so".

There would be a draft Bill to create a "smaller and democratically constituted second chamber."

On health reforms, he said there would be a guarantee that nobody needing to see a cancer specialist would have to wait more than two weeks. No one would have to wait more than 18 weeks for hospital treatment.