A MAJOR £1.5bn government cash injection to tackle Britain's housing crisis was overshadowed yesterday by a row over whether local people would queue-jump council waiting lists.

Unveiling what was dubbed an "early election manifesto", Gordon Brown pledged the extra money would allow an extra 20,000 affordable homes to be built over the next two years.

Local authorities will bid for a slice of the funding, which is desperately needed to reverse soaring waiting lists for council and housing association homes – including in Merseyside and Cheshire.

Almost 73,000 families in the region are waiting for a home, including in the blackspots of Sefton (17.9% of households), Warrington (14.3%), Chester (11.4%) and Wirral (11.1%).

In the Commons, the Prime Minister said new rules would allow town halls to "give more priority to local people whose names have been on the waiting lists for far too long".

Some dubbed the policy "local homes for local people" – in an echo of Mr Brown's now-infamous pledge of "British jobs for British workers", which backfired badly.

But No.10 aides quickly made clear that local authorities would still be required to give priority to the homeless and those in the most overcrowded conditions, regardless of how long they had lived locally.

Only after that responsibility had been met, would they be allowed to prioritise "people with a local connection" and "families on the waiting list for a long time". The extra housing cash – trebling the amount available to £2.1bn over two years – came alongside a raft of policies to give people more power over public services, in a legislative programme entitled Building Britain's Future. They included:

A guaranteed job, work experience or training place for everyone under 25 who has been unemployed for a year;

A threat to dock two weeks’ benefit from anyone refusing to "accept that guaranteed offer" – rising to four weeks if they turned down a job a second time and 26 weeks for a third failure;

A personal tutor for children at state secondary schools, and one-to-one “catch-up tuition” for those who needed it;

A guarantee of hospital treatment within 18 weeks, and an appointment with a cancer specialist within two weeks;

A £150m "innovation fund" for biotechnology, life sciences and low carbon technologies.