Brown says to stay party leader if no majority

The Conservative party are ahead in opinion polls by a slim margin, with some surveys suggesting a hung parliament.

Asked whether he owed it to the Labour party to quit as leader if he failed to get a "decent" majority in the election, Brown told BBC Radio 4: "I owe it to people to continue and complete the work we have started of taking this country out of the most difficult global financial recession."

"I'll keep going," he added. "I'll keep going because I want a majority. I'll keep going."

If no party wins a majority in the election, the party with the most seats could attempt to push ahead with minority support, rather than try and form a coalition, and then hold another election later in the year to try and secure a majority.

Brown, who is under pressure to detail the government's plans to deal with a record budget deficit, also said there would be "more information" in the budget on March 24 about already announced spending cuts, such as to public sector pay.

But he reiterated that economic uncertainty remained.

"We don't know yet what savings we can get from keeping unemployment down, but that runs into billions of pounds," he said. "If we have these savings we can use them to fund our departments, if we don't have these savings it makes it more difficult."

"So there is a degree of uncertainty at the moment about what you can do in the future because of what is happening to both unemployment and debt interest rates and the growth of the economy."

Both Labour and the Conservatives have said they were committed to tackling the deficit, which is projected to grow to more than 12 percent of GDP this year, but they disagree about the timing.