TODAY, the Chancellor will deliver his so-called Budget for public services, and in particular the National Health Service. A Budget on public services is certainly needed and greatly welcomed. High quality public services at a local level rely on a strong national economic performance, and vice versa.

The inadequate state of our public services demands urgent attention. The theme of the Budget, we are told, is that the solution is to be found in a mixture of "investment and reform".

Last year, Gordon Brown promised that "any additional resources for the NHS must be matched by reforms so we get the best value for money. There is not to be one penny more until we get the changes".

I agree with what the Chancellor said - but change never seems to happen. We hear about reform year after year but it never takes place. Instead, the Government acts as though money alone will do the job. Unfortunately, it will not.

Labour's refusal to take reform seriously has meant taxes are up but people have nothing to show for the extra money they have paid.

By the end of last year, in the North-East alone, there were 10,300 more out-patients waiting longer than 13 weeks to see a consultant than when Labour came to power; and teacher vacancies have, sadly, more than doubled in secondary schools in the region since 1997.

Other countries do things differently. They don't think health has to be administered through one big bureaucracy, with every last detail determined by instructions from the centre - right down to the dinner menus in hospitals.

Nor do they believe the resources for healthcare can never come from any source other than general taxation.

And their people get better healthcare - so much so that constituents of mine have been sent to hospitals in France for their operations.

Failing public services damage the economy. As a country, we will find ourselves able to produce less if people are sicker for longer, if school leavers lack basic skills, or if commuters spend more time waiting on station platforms and less time at work. At the same time, it is only a strong economy that can deliver the resources on which successful public services depend.

So, anything that undermines our competitiveness will undermine the long-term future of public services. The British Chamber of Commerce believes that "the sheer quantity of red tape on business is damaging our economy, stifling enterprise, job creation and economic growth".

Hardly surprising then that Britain has fallen from ninth to 19th in the world competitiveness league since 1997.

With a record number of new regulations last year - one for every 26 minutes of the working day - let us hope that the Chancellor will use this Budget to stem the tide of red tape.

Gordon Brown insists we have nothing to learn from abroad - as if it were other countries that had second-rate public services.

If we do not want to condemn future generations of patients, parents and passengers to more of the same, we should be prepared to look with an open mind at the systems that have been found to work elsewhere.

That is what Conservatives have been doing over the past few months and I hope it is something that the Government will now be prepared to do.

If the Chancellor persists with a blinkered approach that rules out any real reform, this Budget will not be the Budget for our public services that we all want to see