'Eco towns' for first-time-buyers

The Chancellor signalled that he would inaugurate a big programme of housebuilding to meet the "pent up" demand for homes for young couples struggling to get a foot on the property ladder.

At the centre of his plans will be five new "eco towns" with some 100,000 new homes, all powered by locally generated energy from sustainable sources.

"I would say a home-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy is what would be in the interests of our country because everybody would have a stake in the country," Mr Brown told BBC One's Sunday AM programme.

He said he wanted to go even further than Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s in extending home ownership while at the same time also increasing the stock of affordable social housing available for rent. "The problem is that even with the great ambitions of the 1950s or the 1980s, they did not succeed in widening the scope for home ownership to large numbers of people who want it," he said.

"But I also recognise you have got to combine the building of housing for ownership with the building of houses for rent in a far more mobile and fluid society."

Mr Brown said that he wanted to expand the rate of housebuilding, currently standing at 185,000 homes-a-year, to 200,000 "as quickly as possible"

"There is a pent up demand. More households are being created than there are places for them," he said. "I recognise that there is a challenge of modern society where young people want to buy or rent their own homes a lot earlier than previously. We have got to make it possible for that to happen. It shows that we are the party and the Government on the side or people with aspirations."

Mr Brown dismissed Tory claims that the plans for 'eco towns' had been announced last year by Housing Minister Yvette Cooper. He said that only one site - at the former military barracks in Oakington in Cambridgeshire had been previously identified. Local councils will be invited to bid to host the other developments.

"It is quite new in the dimensions, it is quite new in also the imagination I think we have in combining the environment and the gains we can make in the environment with housing," he said.