A multibillion-pound package of measures aimed at getting the banks to restart lending to business will be announced by Alistair Darling next month, The Times has learnt.

The Chancellor is considering a national lending scheme under which the Government would guarantee new lending to businesses of all sizes as one of his leading options.

If past loan schemes are followed, the Government would cover most of the risk on each loan, possibly up to 80 per cent, and the bank would bear the rest. The taxpayer could be faced with a big bill if companies defaulted, as some certainly would. The default rate of firms involved in government loan schemes since 1981 is 28 per cent.

Mr Darling's plan will be seen as similar to the £50 billion national loan guarantee scheme proposed earlier this month by the Conservatives.

However, government insiders say that there will be key differences. Officials are urgently seeking ways to ensure that loans guaranteed under the scheme are for new lending and that the lenders do more than merely reschedule existing loans or already-planned loans in order to get them covered by the government guarantee.

The scheme will be far more ambitious than the £1 billion small firms loan guarantee scheme extended in the Pre-Budget Report.

It comes after a warning from Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, that the single most pressing challenge for domestic economic policy is to get the banking system lending normally again.

Mr Darling is keen to unveil the lending scheme in January because thousands of companies renew their loans in the early months of the year.

His latest moves are being prepared as the CBI gives warning that healthy companies will struggle to survive unless the Government takes urgent action to deal with the intensifying credit crunch. It urges the Government further to recapitalise the banks where necessary.

Richard Lambert, Director-General of the CBI, said yesterday that unless credit, on which companies rely for day-to-day business, began to flow again, other government initiatives would be “expensive failures”.

Mr Lambert said that the Government, the Bank and the Financial Services Authority must ensure that banks are not being forced to reduce their exposure to debt too rapidly, which would suck finance out of the economy too fast, crippling otherwise healthy firms and causing long-term damage to the economy.

In a letter to companies, he said: “We still need to address the root of the problem. Credit flows, on which companies depend for day-to-day business, remain severely constrained. Until this underlying issue — getting credit flowing around our economy again — is resolved, economic activity cannot begin to recover. Otherwise healthy companies will face increasing difficulties, and some will struggle to survive.”

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