Ben Gummer
Main Page: Ben Gummer (Conservative - Ipswich)Department Debates - View all Ben Gummer's debates with the Scotland Office
(11 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Prime Minister
The last Government made a lot of guarantees and wrote a lot of cheques, but they could not deliver and they left us with an enormous budget deficit. Let me give the hon. Gentleman the figures: our spending on capital spending is higher than what Labour planned, and annual infrastructure investment is £33 billion, which is £4 billion more than Labour achieved, even in the boom years. That is what happened: they had an unaffordable boom and a painful bust, and it is this Government who are delivering the recovery.
Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)
The Prime Minister knows Ipswich well and he knows that it has some of the poorest wards in the country. He will know that two of those wards were promised schools by the previous Government. They did not deliver them in 13 years. I have just been to the topping out ceremony of one of them, delivered by this Government, and next year we will break ground on the other. When it comes to promises to the least advantaged people in our community, Labour are very good at promising. We deliver.
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Opposition do not like hearing the evidence of the new schools being built by the Government in difficult times. Also, when we talked about the east of England, year after year, there were calls for improvements to the A11—never delivered, but delivered by this Government.