World leaders are already '75 to 80 per cent there' towards reaching a successful outcome to the London Summit on 2 April and need a final push to get from 'good to excellent', Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown said on Sunday.

The final 10 days before the summit of world leaders on 2 April to draw up solutions to the global economic and financial crisis will see a 'flurry of effort'.

He said that the measure of success of the Summit for consumers and voters would be seeing world leaders 'rowing in the same direction' on 2 April.

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, travels to Europe, the United States and Latin America this week as part of the final effort to achieve a comprehensive package of measures to deal with the crisis when leaders meet on 2 April.
Lord Malloch-Brown, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for the Summit, said that while the framework for an agreement at the Summit was '75 to 80 per cent of the way there' after the meeting of G20 finance ministers on 13 and 14 March, the last 10 days would be 'very critical'.

'There will be a last flurry of effort to get from good to, we hope, excellent in terms of the outcome,' Malloch-Brown told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 'It's hard but it’s not impossible.'

He said one unique factor about the approach to the current crisis was that there was a 'feeling of mutual interdependence' among leaders.

'They all realise that their economies are interconnected and that they're all in the market for solutions that bind them together,' he said.

Asked how ordinary people should judge the outcome of the Summit, the Minister said: 'The key criteria is that the ordinary person everywhere, whether as consumers, or voters or in some cases as shareholders, feels their shoulders relaxing a bit and that sense that here are a group of leaders who know what they are doing, they have a plan and are rowing in the same direction'.

He pointed out that the world is in the middle of a 'massive destruction of global wealth that won't stop on 2 April.'

One issue that is likely to feature in the meetings that the Prime Minister will hold this week is the need to move towards a new global trade deal and continued rejection of protectionism.'

Last week on 20 March, leaders of the 27 member states of the European Union reached unanimous agreement on their stance ahead of the London Summit.

In a move which the Prime Minister said had 'laid the foundations' for a successful summit, they set out plans to strengthen financial regulation, restore economic growth and functioning credit markets and provide an extra €100bn to fund rescues of fragile EU states and developing countries.

Lord Malloch-Brown said this injection of resources would give a fiscal boost' to middle- and low-income countries. He played down suggestion of further announcements of stimulus packages by G20 countries, as many were 'in mid-course' of delivering extra resources.

'There's going to be an announcement of global money but it's not necessarily around the major economies' national boost because we’re kind of in mid-course on that,' he said.

Malloch-Brown said free trade would be the 'fastest-moving issue in these last days leading up to the summit’ because of the sudden collapse in trade volumes in the last month.

'Everyone wants to see tough language on trade,' he told the BBC. 'The G20 is not somewhere where you complete and sign a trade treaty, but it is a place where, if these countries commit to each other that they're not going to do anything which infringes trade, free trade… that I think will help restore confidence.'

Speaking at the Brussels Forum 2009 over the weekend, Lord Malloch-Brown said trade issues would join fiscal stimulus and financial regulation at the heart of the Summit discussion.

'The call for free trade to be protected, for monitoring mechanisms to make sure people don’t back-track on their trade commitments, to add in trade finance, to make sure we can get the wheels of trade going again, that issue is racing up there to join the stimulus and regulation as the big issue of this forthcoming summit,' he said.

Watch the The Andrew Marr Show interview with Lord Malloch-Brown on BBC iPlayer. (available until Sunday 29 March 2009)

Read the full transcript