Gordon Brown pinned his hopes for his and Labour’s recovery on a package of strongly Blairite reforms to hospitals, schools, police and welfare yesterday.

Poorly performing hospitals that fail to satisfy patients will lose finance and face ultimate closure and there will be direct intervention in the housing market, with £200 million of taxpayers’ money used to buy unsold homes to help poorer families, Mr Brown said as he foreshadowed 18 Bills for the next parliamentary programme.

Changes to the laws on flexible employment will also mean that millions of working parents with older children will get the right to demand to work part-time from next April.

The day after his £2.7 billion U-turn on the 10p tax rate Mr Brown said that helping family finances was his immediate priority. It was the latest stage of a fightback that continues today when Mr Brown holds his monthly Westminster press conference.

Cherie Blair revealed to The Times at the weekend that her husband has been advising Mr Brown during his current troubles and that Mr Brown could have taken the top job earlier if he had embraced Mr Blair’s public service reforms. Many of the radical measures outlined yesterday would have earned the strong approval of Mr Blair, with new powers for patients, parents and young workers.

Last night in London Mr Brown pledged to put ambition and aspiration at the centre of social policy, and said that public service and welfare reform would move farther and faster on diversity of supply. He promised a health service reform Bill including a new constitution setting out patients’ entitlements to minimum standards of access, quality and safety.

Mr Brown said that payments to NHS hospitals would be adjusted according to patient satisfaction with them and their success rates. In a clear warning that poor hospitals will be closed or given new management, he promised powers to ensure that no healthcare provider should fall below minimum standards.

There will be an education Bill to ensure that, by 2011, no school underperforms, with an independent qualifications system, more power for parents to receive information on children’s progress, and a bigger say on standards and the siting of schools.

Mr Brown announced a £200 million fund to buy unsold new homes and rent them to social tenants or make them available through a shared-ownership scheme. An additional £100 million would be made available to shared equity schemes to help more first-time buyers to purchase newly built homes.

Mr Brown said that the right to flexible working would be extended to parents with older children from April, along with new rights for agency workers. The “right to request” flexible work will be extended to mothers and fathers of secondary school children. At present only those with children aged 6 or younger have that right.

Although ministers say that details of the proposals will be subject to consultation with business, it is expected that parents with children aged 16 and under will all be included in the end. Industry leaders immediately criticised the move, saying that next April was too soon for such a major change.

A police reform Bill would make chief constables accountable to a directly elected representative. There may also be moves to introduce different degrees of homicide, including provocation, diminished responsibility, complicity and infanticide – subject to consultation and a new sentencing commission to monitor the size of prison populations. Tests for immigrants to receive British citizenship are to be made tougher, with newcomers expected to learn English and prove that they are making an economic contribution.

The long-term unemployed will be forced to retrain or have their benefits cut under a welfare reform Bill. Incapacity benefit claimants will be required to go through medical assessments and given a personalised programme to help them return to work.

Eight million people on low incomes will be encouraged to save with a National Savings scheme, with every pound they deposit matched by a contribution from the Government. And after the Northern Rock collapse, protection for depositors’ savings will be extended, probably to £100,000.

David Cameron said that he welcomed many of the measures, as his party had proposed them in the first place. “This Queen’s Speech has nothing to do with the long-term needs of the country and everything to do with your short-term political survival,” he told Mr Brown.

“We need a government that tackles the underlying causes of poverty, that fights family breakdown, that breaks open the monopoly of state education. We need a government that can work with the voluntary sector.”

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