The Government has a three-point plan to improve the quality of people’s lives, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden has said.
He told GB News: “The first is to improve people’s living standards, because they’ve been through a really tough cost of living crisis in the past few years.
“The second thing, which you’d expect to be close to the Labour Party’s heart, is to turn the NHS around. That’s what we did when we were last in government. We’ll do that again.
“And the third point is, around this point about investment, it’s to rebuild the country. Get the house-building going, get the data labs built, get the energy transition investment in, to really get going and re-building the country.
“If we can do those things, then I think it will be good for the country and it will be good prospects for the United Kingdom.”
On the so-called black hole in the public finances, he said: “If you look at the debt figures that were published a few days ago, they underline the point that we’ve been making – higher than expected, higher than the OBR were forecasting when the Budget was made in March,
“That shows you the point that we’ve been making for the last few months, that the public finances are in a more difficult position than the Tories led us to believe, because they announced a lot of things and didn’t put any funding in place to pay for them.
“We’ve been left to pick up the pieces for that. Some of the decisions that we have to make are not ones that we would have wanted to make, but we do have a duty to sort out the public finances, and that’s what the Chancellor has to do in the run up to this Budget in about a month’s time.
“When we’ve done that, the prospects for the country are good.”
He added: “They [Conservative] campaigned in the election for £12 billion of cuts in the welfare budget. Now I don’t know exactly where it was going to fall, but that was a big part of their manifesto.
“They also campaigned for more tax cuts as well, and they had announced all these things that they said they were going to fund.
“They actually set the remit for the public sector pay review bodies…in fact, in the case of education, they had already had the report on the Secretary of State’s desk and chose not to share it with the public.
“So, I don’t know what they were going to do if they were going to win, but I do know one thing, that money wasn’t there for all the things that they pro
