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Amendment of the law

My hon. Friend is right. The word "investment" has been stretched far too wide. This Government have not balanced the Budget since March 2002, which is seven long years ago. In the March 2003 Budget, they said that they would balance the Budget by March 2006. Two years ago, in the March 2007 Budget, the forecast slipped to March 2009. Three years ago, they forecast that we would be back in surplus this year. Last year, the forecast was pushed out further to 2011. In the pre-Budget report, it went out to 2015, and yesterday, as I understand the Red Book, it was forecast that it will be 2017-18 before we are finally back in surplus. The Government have consistently mismanaged public expenditure. They have overestimated revenues and failed to get proper control. There was a time when the job of the Treasury was to control spending. In the past seven or eight years, the Treasury has been directing spending and failing to control it. Now we are told that the remedy lies in even more efficiency savings, despite the fact that the National Audit Office has fully scored only around a quarter of the efficiency savings so far claimed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) eloquently explained, if the economy goes on shrinking, government cannot go on growing. We have to start taking out costs and reducing layers of bureaucracy. We must do what businesses across the country have been doing and what households across the country are now having to do, which is, as my hon. Friend has said, cutting our cloth according to our means. The private sector has already outsourced back-office functions, cut layers of middle management and streamlined procurement. Those things have still not happened in central Government, local government, the health service bureaucracy and education bureaucracy. The perfect indictment of the Labour years is what sadly happened at North Staffordshire hospital. While patients were dying and others were drinking out of vases, three quangos—Monitor, which costs £13 million a year, the Healthcare Commission, which costs £76 million a year and the Audit Commission, which costs more than £200 million a year—were writing letters to each other. That was the failure of North Staffordshire hospital—a failure of the culture of ever-inflating quangos. If we are to maintain the credibility of our currency and reassure overseas investors, we must repair the damage done to our public and private finances over the past few years. We must put our public finances back in order, which involves reducing borrowing and the increase in spending. If we do not do that, we will end up with more cases such as North Staffordshire hospital and we will have to cut programmes for the most vulnerable. If we do not do it, in the end the IMF will have to do it for us.