Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg today addressed the Guardian Public Services Summit – the full text of the speech can be read below.

The questions that confronted me, when I came into government, were these:

How can we reinvent and strengthen our public services at a time of anxiety and stretched resources?

And how can we preserve the public sector ethos as we move to a more plural, diverse and personalised way of running our public services?

There will no doubt be some sceptics in this room about whether those things are possible.

It is a Guardian event, after all, and I think scepticism is in the drinking water over there.

Many of you have been through reconfigurations, redesigns and redeployments so many times you’re probably sick to the back teeth of them.

And you probably groan at the prospect of further reform. But change in the circumstances of today is not a luxury its essential if we want to ensure the best days for our public services are ahead of us. In fact pressure on spending in public services without change would produce the worst out come of all.

We can’t just wait and hope for the best when children are still being let down, and when the poorest are being let down the most.

We can’t just wait and hope for the best when health inequalities are rising

And we can’t just wait and hope the best when, because of the deficit, there simply isn’t the money to paper over cracks and inefficiencies any longer.

We have to modernise our public services.

And we can make them better if we do. (more…)