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Comprehensive Spending Review

I am not going to give way. The spending review will have an impact on the public sector workforce. I should like to say that the ideas, effort and commitment shown by the public sector workforce are essential to helping people to get the best from the services they provide, and we should thank them. The reforms that we are making will make the public services a more rewarding place to work—more power, more trust, more independence—but there will be an impact on employment. The best estimate remains that of the Office for Budget Responsibility, to which hon. Members have referred, which forecast in June a reduction of 490,000 employees over the next four years. Natural turnover will play a big part, but individual employers will make their own decisions on redundancies. Each such decision will be difficult, which we recognise, so we have introduced pay restraint to protect jobs. We will monitor plans closely to try to avoid localised hotspots, and deploy our regional growth fund to support such areas.