Labour will seek out an “ambitious” youth mobility scheme with the EU, allowing thousands of young Europeans to temporarily live and work in the UK, Rachel Reeves has said.

The chancellor told the Times the scheme would be “good for the economy, good for growth and good for business”, but stopped short of specifying precisely who will be eligible.

A scheme that would allow hundreds of thousands of 18- to 30-year-olds from EU countries to live and work in the UK, and vice versa, has been a key European demand in reaching an economic deal with Britain.

Reeves said the exchange scheme would allow “young people in Britain to be able to go and work, to travel, to volunteer, to gain experience, to learn languages in European countries”.

“And we want young people from those European countries to also be able to come to the UK and have the same opportunities that my generation had to travel, work and study in Europe,” she said.

The chancellor also called on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to “score both the improved trade relationships that we’ve negotiated and this youth experience scheme” in its economic forecasts.

Reeves’s remarks come in the lead-up to Labour’s annual party conference this weekend, as well as her crunch November budget, in which she faces the prospect of having to find up to £30bn in tax rises or spending cuts.

Despite the bleak financial outlook in the runup to the budget, the chancellor ruled out the option of a wealth tax. “If you look around the world, and countries that do have wealth taxes, they tend not to have other taxes, like inheritance tax and capital gains tax,” she said.

“Those taxes bring in a large amount to the UK Exchequer, and I don’t want to risk the revenues from those with an experiment on something different.”

She also hit back at economic proposals laid out by Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, who has been touted as a potential successor to Keir Starmer.

Burnham said the UK should not be “in hock” to bond markets as he outlined measures that he believed a Labour government should pursue, including a big council housebuilding programme and the nationalisation of utilities paid for with a rise in taxes on the higher paid, a charge on expensive London homes and £40bn of extra borrowing.

Reeves likened the proposals to those espoused by Liz Truss, whose term as prime minister ended after her catastrophic “mini-budget”.

“The government then took a huge gamble, an experiment on the British economy,” Reeves said. “And as a result interest rates went through the roof, mortgage costs went through the roof. Pensions were put in peril. The cost of government borrowing shot up too.”

While admitting she would like to be “less in hock to bond markets”, she added that “the reality is that we rely on those bond markets and those people participating in them to buy our debt”.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Burnham argued that his remarks on bond markets had been “deliberately misinterpreted”. He said: “This is about a long-term approach to regaining stronger public control of essential services, re-establishing a tighter grip on the public finances and reassuring the markets.”