With his usual directness Eric Pickles managed to sum up the country's fiscal problem in a sentence. Speaking at a Conservative Way Forward event last weekend he picked out the youngest councillor in the audience, aged 21, and told her: ‘You will be on your third Saga cruise before the level of spending goes up again.'

Considering the ongoing dire straits of the public finances, one would have thought the Chancellor's Spending Review last week therefore would have been more radical than it was. This was anything but a ‘transformational' budget. Its commitment to rolling out community budgets, driving health and care together and introducing the Heseltine single pot is half-hearted. The £2bn extra cash from the Department of Health for integration is welcome but a stop-gap and does not solve long-term problems. Even SOLACE urged the Chancellor to go further and faster.