I am getting more and more frightened by what this government is doing.

They may be riding high in the opinion polls but surely that is more down to the Labour Party being entirely focused on their internal problems than acting as the government opposition they are paid to be. Did you know that Jeremy Corbyn makes nearly £60,000 on top of his MP’s salary for being Leader of the Opposition, to say nothing of the over three-quarters-of-a-million pounds that he can take to fund his office? I leave you to decide if this is good value.

But back to my point. I was invited to a meeting of the National Association of Head Teachers in Cumbria the other day to discuss with them the funding shortfall they see coming in this area. According to their figures, schools in Cumbria will be facing a £23m shortfall in their funding by the time of the next election. That is a lot of money.

To put it into context, it is £383 per pupil or 625 teachers less across the county by 2020. The government claims it is protecting the funding per child but this takes no account of the extra costs that they are shifting on to schools. It is yet another example of them playing with numbers and failing to face up to the fact that services are being hit due to their failure to invest the amount needed to keep services even at an acceptable level. Meanwhile it is our children who are suffering.

This follows on from learning about the massive shortfall in money faced by the NHS in our part of the world. In the last three months of 2016 we saw a 20 per cent increase on the levels of hospital operations cancelled at the last moment for reasons other than clinical ones. We all know about the problems faced by people turning up to A&E, not just here but around the country.

Added to which there is a shortage of money in social care which is leading to people having to stay in hospital unnecessarily. The result is that we face a shortage of hospital beds, people are delayed in A&E and ambulances have to wait around before they can take their patients into hospital.

To this we can add the obvious underfunding of our prisons, our defence services, I could go on but it depresses me just to think about it.

Meanwhile all we hear is that we can look forward to ever more spending cuts over the coming years with no plans at all for what we do about the growing problems in our local services.

I have written to Justin Greening, the minister for education; I have bid for a debate in parliament over the funding of Cumbria schools and have demanded a meeting with the schools minister as soon as possible. We need them to tell us what we are expected to do about this hole in local funding.

Sadly I am not holding my breath.