My views on the Chancellor's Spending Review

The last big Parliamentary event that drew my attention was Government’s Spending Review. I was eagerly awaiting to see if, after months of lobbying the Treasury, rural areas like Wiltshire would finally get the investment and care they deserve. 

Whilst I was pleased to see that the Chancellor is increasing day to day funding in many areas and committing to large infrastructure projects that we desperately need I fear that this is too little too late. 

Public services in Wiltshire are in dire need of serious reform and serious investment. After years of neglect from the last Conservative Government it is disappointing that the current Government is failing to deliver that change. 

The Spending Review was a missed opportunity to draw a line under the damage experienced by our public services, which left our NHS on its knees, social care and SEND teetering on the edge, and school and hospital buildings crumbling. The Government must understand that we can’t fix the NHS if we don’t fix social care. 

There was a deafening silence on this in the Chancellor’s speech. NHS investment will be wasted if hospitals can’t discharge patients who do not need to be there - and if local authorities don’t have the resources to care for people in their homes, preventing them going to hospital in the first place. 

The Government has got to speed up and be ambitious to level the playing field between urban cityscapes and rural areas like ours with so much potential for development. The Chancellor must start taking growth seriously. Squeezing departmental budgets even further will not rescue public services, will not deliver growth and will not deliver change. 

Given the number of policy U-turns the Government have been doing recently I still hold out hope that the Government will see the error of their ways and step up to deliver real, meaningful change for areas like ours which are so full of potential.