We must work fast because we've already seen the vertiginous drop in GDP
and we know that people are worried now about their jobs and their businesses
and we're waiting as if between the flash of lightning and the thunder clap
with our hearts in our mouths for the full economic reverberations to appear.
And so we've must use this moment now this interval to plan our response
and to fix of course the problems that were most brutally illuminated
in that Covid lightning flash.
The problems in our social care system, the parts of government that seemed
to respond so sluggishly so that sometimes it seemed like
that recurring bad dream when you're telling your feet to run
and your feet won't move.
And yet we must also go further and realize that if we are to recover fully,
if we're to deal with the coming economic aftershock then this
Covid crisis is also the moment to address the problems in our country that
we have failed to tackle for decades.
Too many parts of our amazing country felt left behind, neglected, unloved,
as though someone had taken a strategic decision that their fate did not matter
as much as the metropolis.
So I want you to know that this government not only has a vision
to change this country for the better,
we have a mission to unite and to level up and it's a mission on which
we were elected last year and we have a plan.
And in advancing that plan now, I just serve notice that we will not
be responding to this crisis with what people called austerity.
We're not going to cheese pear our way out of trouble
because the world has moved on since 2008
and we not only face a new and in some ways a far bigger challenge,
and I can tell everybody, businesses, that next week the Chancellor Rishi Sunak
will be setting out our immediate plan to support the economy through
the first phase of the recovery.
But this moment also gives us a much greater chance to be radical
and to do things differently, to build back better
and to build back bolder and so we will be doubling down on our strategy.
We will double down on leveling up if you can make sense of that.
And this government has not forgotten that we were elected
to build 40 new hospitals and we will.
Matt Hancock is setting out the list in the next few days and that is just
the beginning.
We will continue and step up the biggest-ever program of funding the NHS
and we won't wait to fix the problems of Social Care that every government
has flunked for the last 30 years.
We well end the injustice that some people have to sell their homes
to finance the cost of their care while others don't
and we're finalising our plans and we will build a cross-party consensus.
And so we're investing massively now in education
with over £14 billion pounds for primary and secondary education between now
and 2023.
And today with a new 10-year school building program beginning now
with £1 billion for the first 50 schools and a vast £1.5 billion program
for refurbishing our dilapidated FE sector.
Dilapidated in many places, not here of course.