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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I do not. The hon. Gentleman has a great deal of knowledge as a shadow Health Minister, so he knows much more about the economics of those issues than I do. We are meeting our targets, and the people who come to us are exceptions. Mr. Golding was the first case with which I have dealt in the past year of a constituent who is concerned about the delay—we would know if there were other such urgent cases, because people would contact their MPs—so matters are progressing, which I welcome. The money has gone to front-line services, and it has improved our targets, which is to the benefit of our constituents, but of course it is important that we look at the way in which services are delivered locally by officials. I agree that there are too many managers in our local health service, which is why I welcome the meeting that I held last Thursday with Tim Rideout, the new chief executive of Leicester PCT, who told me that a tier of management will be removed in Leicester, so even more money will be spent on local services. Mistakes have been made. One PCT would be sufficient in a city such as Leicester, so goodness knows why we had to have two. Such decisions must be looked at very carefully indeed, as we are dealing with public money, but I am pleased with the large investment in the health service in Leicester. The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda), is in the Chamber, so I hope that he will tell his colleagues how pleased we were to receive a visit from the Minister for Schools. Sadly, when he came to Leicester to meet the leader of the Liberal Democrat council, I could not attend, because it was a mid-week visit, but he looked at Judgemeadow community college, which will be completely rebuilt, and St. Paul’s—not that St. Paul’s, but another one in Leicester—which is a Catholic school that the Minister opened and has received public funding to build a new performing arts centre. Our schools are going to rebuilt, as a result of the largest investment by any Government in education in Leicester. Some £230 million is going into the local education system, which we should welcome enormously. The Opposition chant, ““Where has the money gone?””, and it has gone on local services, to improve them and provide benefits for our constituents, which is why they are happy with what the Government have done, and why they elected them three times in a row with large majorities. May I turn to Britain’s position in the world and the way in which the Budget helps us to build on our achievements in Europe? I am glad that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is in the Chamber, because he has performed many excellent ministerial roles in the past 10 years, including negotiating with our European partners. Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary of the adoption of the Lisbon agenda. I had the privilege of serving as Minister for Europe at the time, and I saw the way in which the Prime Minister negotiated a set of benchmarks for the European economy, if I may put it like that. For the first time ever at a European summit, we had a set of benchmarks against which the European economies would be measured, to see whether they were successful. It was not the usual warm words that are spoken European summits, where everything is wonderful and everyone is happy with everything that Europe has done. Those benchmarks were revisited two years ago on the fifth anniversary of the Lisbon agenda—the Kok report, too, looked at the success of European economies after Lisbon—so we can determine how well we have done against the Lisbon criteria. There has been growth of 25 per cent. in the past eight years and, moreover, we are the fourth-best performing economy on criteria in the Lisbon agenda. We are the best of the big European economies, and that is because of the Government’s policies. If we want to turn the European Union into the most dynamic and knowledge-based economy in the world, and if the competition is the United States, as it always is, we can see that the benchmarks set at Lisbon have made an extremely important contribution to what our Chancellor and the Treasury team have achieved in trying to move the agenda forward. That agenda has not only provided a strong economy, but has created jobs. There was a great deal of concern among Opposition Members about the arrival of our fellow citizens from eastern Europe when the A8 joined a few years ago. They voiced criticism and, in fact, the then Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), was going to go to Luton airport to judge how many EU citizens were coming to work in this country. Enlargement, however, has been an enormous success, and the Government, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have led the process of enlargement. The combination of enlargement and the Lisbon agenda means that the citizens of the A8 who have come to the UK have produced huge benefits for our economy. Their taxes have benefited the economy, and their hard work and dedication have helped us to keep our place, which is why the Germans and the French must regret very much failing to do what we did two years ago, when we allowed the A8 citizens unfettered access to the UK. I was disappointed that on 1 January this year we did not extend that unfettered access to the Romanians and Bulgarians, as I believed that allow such access would further help the economy and make it even stronger. However, a review has been promised by the Home Secretary, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who knows those reports and the statistics, will tell him that the enlargement of the European Union and our success on the Lisbon agenda have provided a huge boost to our economy.