Ten years of a Labour government and things are different. Talk to most doctors, nurses, police officers and teachers and they will agree that the extra funding for health, education and the police have made significant differences. Our great cities are being transformed via one of the biggest urban renewal programmes ever seen in Britain. The difficulty has not been in securing the necessary investment, it has been in securing the reforms that have needed to go with the additional investment to ensure that it impacts effectively.

The forces of conservatism that Blair referred to back in 1999 were so deeply embedded within some of our public services that we should not have been surprised that changing the culture in our schools and hospitals was going to be bloody. Neal appears to ignore the fact public sector had experienced massive, near-fatal under-investment for the 18 years of Tory rule. He also overlooks that many of these public services - education and health in particular - operated a two-tier system with often huge variations in the quality of service provided between one school and another or one hospital and another. Public services were, and to some extent remain, deeply unequal as league and performance tables in the NHS and schools illustrate. in 1997 the `best' schools were either private or in affluent areas; access to the best healthcare could be bought; the highest crime areas were in the lowest-income neighbourhoods; and public transport was most deficient in serving the most deprived housing estates.

Neal fails to acknowledge that throughout the Tory years the affluent and the well educated (many of them Labour members and supporters), were able to buy their way out of failing or inadequate provision - a situation the Tories `opting out' reforms of the 1980s encouraged. For some reason Neal is reluctant to admit that there have been some real improvements since Labour came to office in 1997. In England and Wales the number of heart operations each year has risen by over 30 per cent since 1997 - no patient is now waiting more than nine months for heart surgery. Over 98 per cent of patients referred by their GP with suspected cancer are now seen within two weeks, while 96 per cent of patients receive their treatment within a month's diagnosis of breast cancer.

In schools, we have the best primary tests, GCSE and A-Level results ever. Almost no infants are now in class sizes of more than 30 and 9,000 schools have new classrooms and facilities. More than 800 failing schools in England have been removed from special measures and turned around.

This is good stuff and the public wants to see more. Yet the reality is that many of the improvements of the past few years have been quick-fix and easy-win in nature. Real, transformational and long lasting change will take much longer. The battle (and it is a battle) to transform our public services is not yet won. Public services in Britain are still in the process of being revived and renewed yet there are many like Neal who apparently want to see not revival but reversal.

In the general election of 2005 Blair staked Labour's reputation on delivering further improvements in our public services; a Brown-led government would be wise to review this decision. Not because it is the wrong direction in which to proceed, but because it is a four, possibly five-term objective.

Neal appears to believe that Labour under Blair - or Gordon Brown - lacks a radical vision for the nation's future. He virtually accuses Blair of having achieved nothing because he hasn't tackled everything. Britain has got better since 1997, Blair and Brown have had their successes (and failures) - it is simply disingenuous of Neal not to admit as much.