Support for Britain's ruling Labour Party has slumped to a 25-year low, according to a poll.

The YouGov poll in the Sunday Times suggests voters are disillusioned over Prime Minister Gordon Brown's handling of the economy against a backdrop of worldwide financial turmoil.

As Opposition Conservative leader David Cameron wrapped up his party's spring conference with a pledge for more "family-friendly", the poll showed the Conservatives on 43 per cent, Labour on 27 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 16 percent.

A national election does not have to be held until 2010, but the next major test for Cameron and Brown comes in local council elections in May.

After initially riding high when he succeeded Tony Blair last year, Brown's popularity has plummeted in polls and Alistair Darling, his successor as finance minister, has suffered a rough ride too.

Darling has battled to deal with the global credit crisis and Britain's first bank run in more than a century, which resulted in the government having to nationalise the country's fifth-biggest mortgage lender.

The Conservatives are consistently a party that pledges vote-winning tax cuts but this time, with the global economy squeezed by the credit crunch, they are adopting a much more cautious approach.

The party's shadow chief treasury spokesman Philip Hammond warned that, if elected, a Conservative government could rule out tax cuts for the length of a whole parliament to build up a "bonus" that could be offered in a follow-up election.

"When the money's piled up in the pot, then you give it away in tax cuts. It only makes sense to look at this over an economic cycle," he said.

© Independent Television News Limited 2008. All rights reserved.