Cameron focuses on 'Britain living within its means'

David Cameron will today hammer home his key election theme of "Britain living within its means" as MPs vote on the coalition's "charter for budget responsibility" which commits to £30bn of savings or tax rises by 2017/18 to eliminate the current structural deficit.

Ahead of the vote, the prime minister yesterday implored voters not to pass on a "legacy of debt" to their children.

At a speech to Conservative supporters in Nottingham, he challenged Labour to spell out which taxes it intended to raise after the election to balance day-to-day government spending.

Ed Miliband has said Labour would support the charter on the basis that his party has also committed to balancing spending "as soon as possible". The Tories have said they would carry on cutting throughout the next parliament to build a surplus, some of which would be used to fund £7bn of tax cuts.

Both leaders on the campaign trail yesterday retrenched to safe ground as they made their pitch to voters ahead of the May poll.

The prime minister warned the electorate that "nothing will be possible unless we eliminate our deficit and deal with our debts". He also used his first big election speech to to hit back at Labour's accusations that a Tory government would take Britain "back to the 1930s" and insisted that his proposed spending cuts were "do-able".

"It requires us to continue the same rate of saving for the first two years of the next parliament, as we have done for the past five years," Mr Cameron said. "It means reducing overall government spending by just one per cent each year. Put another way, we have to save £1 a year in every £100 that government spends.

"I don't think there's a family or business that couldn't do that - and I don't think government, seeing as it's your money, should be any different."

Separately on Monday, a ComRes poll showed that the NHS had jumped 11 per cent to become the voters' biggest concern, overtaking immigration.

Speaking at an event in Stevenage in Hertfordshire, Mr Miliband seized on the prime minister's decision not to single out the health service as a manifesto theme as proof it was not a priority for the Tories.

"David Cameron has gone from saying the NHS were the three most important letters to him, to the health service becoming the subject that dare not speak its name," said the Labour leader. Elizabeth Rigby and George Parker

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