Treasury and Work and Pensions

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will confirm that unemployment is now rising in Cheshire, as in the rest of the country. We have had the biggest rise in unemployment of any developed country in the world in the last year. Let us consider the second great failure of this Chancellorship: public services. The question that haunts the Chancellor is how he could have spent so much and achieved so little. When he was shadow Chancellor, he said that the benchmark for a Government’s success is not how much they spend but how well they use their resources. Again, he has failed on his own benchmark. He has doubled the health service budget, but 60 hospitals face cutbacks, 106 community hospitals face closure and 20,000 front-line health jobs face the axe.