Tony Blair delivered his address yesterday at the Labour Party’s annual conference promising to put hard-working families at the heart of the agenda.

The Prime Minister promised action on pensions. A new system would be introduced, he said with the basic state pension at its ‘core’. Central to its success would be moving more people off benefits and into work to pay for the pensions’ solution.

Blair also vowed to boost vocational education, boost holiday allowances to include bank holidays, increase the National Minimum Wage, support flexible working for carers and create a new offence of corporate manslaughter.

His ten-point plan to improve lives for working families includes:

1. Boosting the economy: including support for first-time buyers, lowering interest rates, creating more jobs and offering tax relief
2. Vocational training: introduction of new vocational courses at school. Free skills training for adults together with 300,000 modern apprenticeships
3. Schools: the creation of 200 city academies and the installation of more modern sports facilities in schools
4. Health: build more hospitals and slash waiting times
5. Support for parents: ‘universal, affordable and flexible’ childcare for parents of three to 14 year olds
6. Jobs and pensions: move more people off benefit and into work and put the basic state pension at the heart of the UK’s pension scheme
7. Technology: roll-out broadband to all homes by 2008 and increase science investment by £1 billion
8. Law and order: fight crime with dedicated community policy teams, give local people input into policing and take action to prevent violence and drug abuse from binge drinking
9. ID cards for immigrants: control asylum with ID cards and electronic registration
10. Fair deal for all at work: increase the minimum wage, attain equal pay for men and women and guarantee four weeks’ paid holiday plus bank holidays.

He urged the unions to stick with Labour repeatedly referring to the choices between a government led by him and a Conservative administration. Encouraging their full support Blair promised to incorporate union views into the Labour manifesto.

Amicus leader Derek Simpson said that Blair had done well to tackle the issues at the heart of business including pensions, jobs and employment protection.

“It was welcome to hear him committing to changes designed to help ordinary working people,” commented Simpson.

Critics, however, dismissed the speech as an ‘election battle-cry’.

Conservative Co-Chairman Dr Liam Fox said that Blair’s keynote speech was ‘all talk’.

“Tony Blair is very much out of touch if he thinks the only reason people don’t trust him is Iraq. The real reason is because he said taxes would not rise and they have; he said there would be no tuition fees for students, and now there are; he said he would cut crime yet we have a record level of violent crime; and he said he would control asylum and immigration, but it’s out of control,” he said.

Addressing the issue of Iraq, Blair appealed to voters by saying he was ‘like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong.’ While acknowledging that intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was wrong he insisted that the world was safer having ousted Saddam Hussein from power.