Prime minister Gordon Brown has claimed accountants and financiers know Tory plans to axe £3.5bn by limiting inheritance tax to millionaires cannot be paid for by requiring non-doms to pay a flat £25,000 levy.

He was speaking at his first Press Conference at 10 Downing Street since calling off the general election because of the popularity of the Conservative proposal.

Brown said: 'Only several thousand people are capable of paying the money that's being talked about, and to most people in the tax industry and accountancy industry this is very well known.'

Brown said the Tory policy was based on there being 150,000 non-doms paying £25,000 each but he believed there were 'only a few thousand people' who could, raising just £650m.

The Tory total, he claimed, included foreign nurses and US businessmen in the UK for only a year.

Further reading:

Tories want Darling apology in non-dom row

Treasury unveils costings on Tory non-dom levy