GORDON BROWN yesterday pledged hundreds of millions of pounds to support car production at Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant.

But the Prime Minister said the financial support for the plant’s new owner, Canadian firm Magna, will be dependent on it securing the right to build the new Ampera electric car.

It is understood that around £400m of UK Government support could be on the table.

Mr Brown started his third visit to Merseyside in little over a year with a trip to the Vauxhall factory, where 2,200 people work.

“I came here today to say we will put our faith in the Ellesmere Port workers, we will support the re-financing of the company to enable cars to be produced here and continue to be produced for many years to come.”

It came on a day in which Mr Brown, addressing the TUC annual congress in Liverpool, admitted for the first time that spending cuts were needed to bring down the country’s ballooning national debt.

Uncertainty surrounds the future of the Ellesmere Port workforce, after Magna bought the majority stake in GM’s European operations last week.

Magna is believed to be targeting 10,000 redundancies from GM Europe’s 54,000-strong workforce.

It is feared that the firm could cut around 840 jobs from the Ellesmere Port factory.

The German Government has pledged between 4.5bn and 5bn euros to minimise the number of job losses in its own country.

Yesterday, Mr Brown was keen to show that the British Government will also support jobs by putting in financial support.

But it will be tied to Magna agreeing to build the new Ampera electric car, which could enter production in 2012, at Ellesmere Port.

Mr Brown told workers: “The Government is wholly behind the workforce here in everything they are trying to do to make better models for the future and at the same time to get into the low carbon market which is going to be very important.

“We are putting our faith in the future of Ellesmere Port, we are putting our faith in the future of the new model Astra that is about to appear.

“We want to see this as the location for the low carbon car of the future and I know a huge amount of planning is going into this.”

Mr Brown was taken on a tour of the production line and had a briefing with senior management at the plant as the first new model Astras rolled off the production line.

He later praised the employees as “the best workers in Europe”.

“I have come here to talk about the future and about the importance of this plant, and the workforce, to the future of the UK.

“I wanted to congratulate them on the success of the Astra model.”

“Now that there has been a change of ownership and we have a new company in Europe we are prepared to say not just to say that we support it, we are prepared to be part of the financing programme for the future.”