Britain's Brown Vows to Tackle Housing Shortage

Prime Minister Gordon Brown will propose ways to tackle a shortage of affordable housing on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown will propose ways to tackle a shortage of affordable housing on Wednesday as he set out his plans for Britain after 10 years of Tony Blair.

Brown was set to unveil proposals on housing, health and education in a speech to parliament at 12:30 p.m. (1130 GMT), his spokesman said.

By announcing his legislative plans now, instead of the usual time in November, he wants to give the public time to air their views on his proposals before they are turned into formal legislation.

Brown, who succeeded Blair as prime minister on June 27, made clear on Wednesday that a key focus will be on tackling a growing housing crisis.

House prices tripled in Britain during Blair's decade in power, pricing many young people and the lower paid out of buying their own homes while there are long waiting lists for homes rented by local authorities.

"House prices are unaffordable for large numbers of people who are starting up and trying to get onto the housing ladder for the first time," Brown told BBC radio. "We have got to deal with this problem."

Britain must build more houses to meet demand and the government was also looking at a 20-year mortgage at a fixed interest rate, he said.

Finance minister Alistair Darling has said the government wants to boost the availability of long-term fixed-rate home loans, believing this will make the market less volatile.

Most fixed-rate mortgages available in Britain are just for two or three years.

Brown gave no details of how the government would encourage private-sector lenders to offer long-term fixed-rate mortgages.

IRAQ ROLE DEFENDED

Brown has put his focus squarely on improving public services such as health and education, which many voters remain deeply unhappy with even though Blair pumped billions of pounds of extra funding into them.

Brown knows improving these services are key to him winning another term in office at the next general election, expected in 2009, in the face of the resurgent opposition Conservatives.

He has put less emphasis than Blair did on foreign policy such as Britain's unpopular military involvement in Iraq, but he stood by Britain's role there in the BBC interview.

Although he regretted British military deaths and said economic reconstruction in Iraq should have begun a lot earlier, Brown said Britain -- which has some 5,500 soldiers in Iraq -- had obligations to the country.

He denied the invasion of Iraq had made Britain less secure. "You cannot be secure in a situation where you have a set of terrorist groups loosely linked as al Qaeda that are determined to practice carnage across the world," he said.

Islamist suicide bombers killed 52 commuters in London in July 2005 and there have been a number of foiled or abortive attacks since then, including failed bombings in London and Glasgow during Brown's first days in power.