How tax cuts have all of a sudden become affordable, just in time for the election - Andy Brown

Everywhere you look there are really important services that are struggling to deliver the standards that the public are entitled to expect.

It ought to be a basic right for anyone in Britain to be able to ring up a dentist and get treatment when they are in acute pain from toothache without worrying over whether they can afford it.

Yet there are parts of Yorkshire where it is incredibly challenging to find an NHS dentist and the cost of using one makes a serious dent in the budget of people on modest incomes.

Go to an A&E department and instead of being quickly ushered in to have your problem dealt with it has become routine to sit and wait for hours in pain. Just before Christmas I developed kidney stones, which is right up there on anyone’s index of unpleasant experiences. I waited nine hours in acute pain. In a hospital which is rated one of the best in the country.

The walls of that hospital are propped up with metal supports. Airedale hospital, on the edge of Keighley, was constructed out of RAAC concrete which is now crumbling. Managers tried for years to alert the government to the need for a long term solution. After a hard struggle they have finally been told that Airedale is one of the seven hospitals that are top of the list of the rebuilding programme.

Which sounds like excellent news. Until you look a little closer. Then you discover that there is not yet an agreed plan of what a new hospital will look like. There is no clear timescale. And there is no agreed budget for the work.

If all goes well, the earliest a new hospital could possibly be delivered is 2030.

All rarely goes well with major building projects. In the meantime, the doctors and nurses will have to muddle through and work around the roof supports.

Keighley and Ilkley is one of the most marginal constituencies in the country. So much has been made of the announcement of a new hospital. There has been a lot less information about how unclear the plans are, how long it will take to complete the work and how very uncertain the funding of it is.

After all, how can we be confident of future plans when such a central plank of government policy as HS2 got cancelled despite billions having been spent on preparation and much of the environmental damage having been done?

Public transport in the north ought to be right up there at the top of any list of urgent needs.

Many argued for years that it might be wise to fix problems like the squalid state of the stations in Bradford or the cross Pennines lines before embarking on HS2. Now years after the event the government is busy making a lot of promises that cancelling HS2 late in the day will enable it to deliver some of the necessary investment.

What confidence can any of us have that these new fine sounding schemes will actually be delivered when all we are getting from HS2 is a fast link between Old Oak Common and Birmingham?

Good government is about making the right choices on how to use scarce resources. Ours is seriously considering cutting inheritance tax. Which is a very strange priority when 94 per cent of the population never pays this tax because it is already possible to hand down a million pounds entirely free of tax.

The group of people that are most in need of financial support right now are young people paying sky high rents or mortgages whilst struggling to pay childcare costs. They will no doubt be very grateful for every penny that comes their way in tax cuts. They would have been a lot more grateful if their government had never conducted a reckless gamble with the economy which drove up mortgage payments in the first place.

What the country badly needs is a focus on long term investment that cuts running costs and helps make the country more independent and self-sufficient whilst rapidly cutting wasteful expenditure on oil and gas.

What it risks getting are a set of unaffordable temporary tax cuts in the run up to the election.

Before the next government takes a look at the books and realises how very unaffordable those tax cuts really are.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.