France and Britain warned today against the danger of complacency in the face of continuing world recession and they joined a call for progress over the climate and oil prices at the G8 summit which opens in Italy on Wednesday.

At an unusually cordial Franco-British summit in the lakeside resort of Evian, President Sarkozy and Gordon Brown also set a deadline of March 2010 for sanctions against countries which continued to give haven to tax evaders. “The writing is on the wall for tax havens wherever they may be,” the Prime Minister said.

An agreement on policing illegal immigration from the Channel ports to Britain was also concluded at the summit, which was attended by half a dozen Cabinet ministers from each state. Britain is to spend £15 million on new equipment for detecting stowaways and other illegal immigrants at the French ports.

Mr Brown secured backing from Mr Sarkozy for a push for aggressive policies to restart growth after the round of stimulus packages agreed among world leaders late last year.

Too many banks and some countries were failing in their task of lending to relaunch industry and services, said Mr Brown, who described Franco-British relations as the best they had ever been. “If we do not take further action, then we will have low growth,” Mr Brown said.

Mr Sarkozy put France’s emphasis on new regulation and economic co-ordination. “We will not accept a return to the situation that we had before,” he said. “We believe that 2009 will be decisive in terms of regulation, new world governance and the fight against global warming, and we are going to shake up things together.”

The President warned the financial world that there could be no return to “those crazy levels of remuneration where the more you speculated, the more you were paid”. He defended France against charges of protectionism but said that there was “a total convergence of views” with Mr Brown before the G8 at L’Aquila, the Italian town devastated by an earthquake this year.

“It is very important for me to support unreservedly the British Government’s position on the need to achieve real growth worldwide,” he said. “We cannot afford to have low growth rates over many years.”

The two countries will push ideas for stabilising the oil market at the G8 and the next G20, but the leaders did not produce a detailed plan. “The most important commodity that the world needs is also among the most volatile and unstable,” said Mr Brown, adding that Saudi Arabia and the Opec countries would be involved in the oil price plan.

The two leaders, who showered complements on each other, spent the bulk of their tête-à-tête on the urgency of measures to combat climate change, they said. The next G20 summit in Pittsburgh in September would have to be far-sighted and achieve “hard and fast results when it comes to regulation,” Mr Sarkozy said.

Both men, however, were defensive when asked about the carbon impact of staging a full-dress summit with hundreds of staff and police and arrival by helicopter at a luxury hotel in the Alps rather than in an office in London or Paris.

“I was wondering if I shouldn’t just stay here for the next two days and go on to Italy and save some carbon,” Mr Brown said. Mr Sarkozy said that the pair had made great progress on the climate “and you can’t do that by telephone between the Elysée Palace and Downing Street”.

Mr Brown, who called Mr Sarkozy “truly a force of nature”, was grateful for strong support from France over the anti-British offensive by Iran. He said that Europe would act together if Tehran pursued its hostile actions.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that London was analysing the policy implications of splits appearing in the religious leadership of Iran over the conduct of last month’s disputed elections.

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