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Gordon Brown is preparing to unveil a £20 billion national loan scheme to help businesses through the looming recession, inthenews.co.uk understands.

The Conservative party is already claiming the government has copied its own national loan guarantee scheme proposed last November.

"We have been calling on Gordon Brown to introduce [a] national loan guarantee scheme for two months and while the prime minister has dithered dozens of businesses and thousands of jobs have been lost," shadow chancellor George Osborne said.

"Let us hope that they will properly implement this Conservative policy rather than a pale imitation, or else they run the risk of repeating the mistakes of their expensive temporary VAT cut and achieving nothing."

Despite initially rejecting the Tory blueprint, business secretary Lord Mandelson is expected to unveil a Labour version of the scheme tomorrow, with loans of up to £1 million for small- and medium-sized companies being underwritten by the taxpayer.

The Labour plan is basically an extension of a scheme in the Pre-Budget Report, in which chancellor Alistair Darling promised £1 billion to encourage bank lending.

Government sources indicate the government plan will be less focused on general guarantees and more on companies running temporarily short of credit.

The Liberal Democrats have already dismissed both the Labour and Tory schemes as "stunts and wheezes".

"The government has already invested £37 billion of taxpayers' money recapitalising the banks," said Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Vince Cable. "It has bottled out of ensuring that the banks comply with their undertaking to maintain lending to sound businesses.

"There can be no justification whatsoever for this huge sum of money being held back from good commercial borrowers.

"This failure is particularly unforgivable in the case of the big semi-nationalised banks like RBS and HBOS, for which the government is not willing to assume responsibility.

"Despite their protestations, the Conservatives' proposal is identical to that of the government and will involve large potential liabilities for the taxpayer. It is striking that the Conservatives are now calling for additional subsidies for the banks by demanding better terms for recapitalisation.

"The government and the Conservatives have got this badly wrong and are not giving proper priority to taxpayers' interests."