Brown announces housing aid and banking reforms

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced 300 million pounds of new schemes to help the troubled housing market on Wednesday and proposed a new banking law to support financial stability.

The proposed banking reform bill will allow short-term non-disclosure of liquidity assistance by the Bank of England and enable the Financial Services Authority to collect information from troubled banks and let them share it with the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

The failings of the system of bank regulation were exposed last year when Britain suffered its first run on a major bank in more than a century, leading to the nationalisation this year of Northern Rock.

(Reporting by Adrian Croft; Editing by Katherine Baldwin)