Lucy Powell

I thank the hon. Lady, and echo her comments about the Modernisation Committee. It has captured a great deal of interest in this place, and I encourage Members to do as she suggested. She is entirely right about the Conservative party’s leadership race. It is a matter for the Conservatives as to why they are not putting forward a new leader to respond to the Budget, but over the past few weeks we seem to have seen a fair amount of soft-balling from the acting leader and deputy leader during our exchanges. Perhaps if they were not down in their own rabbit hole of oblivion, they would have presented someone better to come to the Dispatch Box next week. The hon. Lady is also right in saying that public services are in deep crisis after 14 years of failure and under-investment. My husband is an A&E doctor, so I know all too well that a crisis faces our NHS this winter, as it has done every winter in recent years. The Health Secretary has taken rapid action to end the doctors’ strike, which was causing so much additional stress to the NHS, he has taken early steps to ensure that there are extra appointments, and he is doing a huge amount of work to bring down waiting lists and to foresee some of the winter crisis. There is no doubt that the choices that will confront us in the Budget will be difficult, given our woeful economic inheritance, but there is hope ahead. We will get the economy growing again, we will get that investment into our public services, and we will fix the economy for the long term.