I think it's great we're having these debates, and I hope they go some way to restore some of the faith and some of the trust into our politics, because we badly need that once again in this country.
The expenses saga brought great shame on parliament.
I'm extremely sorry for everything that happened.
Your politicians, frankly all of us, let you down.
Now, there is a big choice at this election: we can go on as we are, or we can say no, Britain can do much better; we can deal with our debts, we can get our economy growing and avoid this jobs tax, and we can build a bigger society.
But we can only do this if we recognise we need join together, we need to come together, we need to recognise we're all in this together.
Now, not everything Labour has done in the last 13 years has been wrong - they've done some good things and I would keep those, but we need change, and it's that change I want to help to lead.
Gerard, what I would say is that immigration is simply too high at the moment.
It has been these last ten years, and it does need to come down.
I think the pressures that we've put on housing and health and education have been too great.
If you look at the...what's happening with immigration, the difference between the amount of people going to live overseas and those coming here, it's been often as high as 200,000. That's equivalent to two million across a decade.
It's too much.
I want us to bring immigration down so it is in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.
How would we do that?
I think we need to have not just a points system, but also a limit on migration when people are coming from outside the European Union for economic reasons.
I also think when new countries join the European Union, that actually we should have transitional controls so they can't all come here at once.
It's been too high these last few years, and I would dearly love to get it down to the levels it was in the past so it is no longer an issue in our politics as it wasn't in the past.
I think a cap is necessary because we're not going to control immigration unless we actually take some quite positive and concrete steps.
I think we let down everyone if we don't do this properly.
I was in Plymouth recently, and a 40-year-old black man made the point to me.
He said, "I came here when I was six, I've served in the Royal Navy for 30 years.
I'm incredibly proud of my country.
But I'm so ashamed that we've had this out-of-control system with people abusing it so badly."
If we don't address immigration properly, we're letting down immigrant communities, as well as everybody else.
So we do need a cap.
As well as border controls that Gordon talks about, and I support strong border controls, I think we need to go one step further and have a proper border police force so we combine at our borders, customs, immigration, security, and police, so we make the most of the fact that we do have policeable borders, and we can stop more illegal immigration that way as well.
On Nick's point, of course we've benefited from immigration for decades in our country.
People have come here to work hard, to make a contribution, to bring their special skills.
We see that in our health service and schools all the time.
But I do think it's got out of control, and it does need to be brought back under control.
A lot of people would ask, though, we've had 13 years of a government that's now only started to talk about addressing this issue.
If you look at the numbers, net migration levels before 1997 were never greater than 77,000 a year.
Under your government, they've never been less than 140,000 a year.
That's a very big number.
You're only starting before an election to take the steps that need to be taken.
It's absolutely true that the other side of the coin is proper welfare reform.
We have got too many people who could work, who are offered work but who don't work.
That has actually drawn a lot of people into our country.
We do need to reform welfare.
But again, 13 years have gone by when welfare hasn't been properly reformed.
Can I just ask Nick one?
Can I just ask Nick one question about this regional approach?
I don't quite understand how you can ask people to come to one part of the country and rely on them staying in that one country...
You have a vision of the M62 with a border post?
Jacqueline, the system isn't working properly now, there's no doubt about it.
We're not seeing enough police on the streets, we're not catching enough burglars, we're not convicting enough.
Then we do, when we do convict them, they're not getting long enough sentences.
I went to Crosby the other day and I was talking to a woman there who had been burgled by someone who had just left prison.
He stole everything in her house.
As he left, he set fire to the sofa and her son died from the fumes.
That burglar, that murderer, could be out of prison in just four-and-a-half years.
The system doesn't work, but that sort of sentence is, I think, just completely unacceptable in terms of what the public expect for proper punishment.
What have we got to do?
We've got to get rid of the paperwork and the bureaucracy and we've got to get the police out on the streets.
We need very clear signals from our criminal justice system: if you cross someone's threshold and rob their home, you go to prison, and you go to prison for a long time.
I think one additional point that I would make is if you look at where so much of the burglary, so much of the car crime is coming from, it is actually coming from people who are addicted to drugs.
I think we've got to be much faster at getting drug addicts off the streets and into treatment.
And all too often, that doesn't happen.
And even when it does today, they get put on a substitute drug.
We're not really dealing with the problem, which is to get these people to confront their problems and lead drug-free lives.
I even went to a drug rehab recently in my own constituency, and met a young man who told me that he committed a certain amount of crimes so he could get in front of a judge who could then get him a place in a residential rehab centre.
We must be mad as a country not to get people into that residential rehab to get them to clean up their lives, so we cut the crime on our own streets.
Thank you!
Let me take on directly this question of money and public spending.
It will be a common feature through these debates about how do we fund the public services we need?
I think it's really important that we start focusing on what we get out of the money that we put in, because if we think that the future is just spending more and more money, we're profoundly wrong.
Hold on...
Yes, of course.
Let me give you an example...
What matters is what comes out.
I went to a Hull police station the other day.
They had five different police cars, and they were just about to buy a £73,000 Lexus.
There's money that could be saved to get the police on the frontline.
The Metropolitan Police have 400 uniformed officers in their human resources department.
Our police officers should be crime fighters, not form-fillers, and that's what needs to change.
On that point, let me take Nick back to his manifesto and one pledge that's in there that worried me a lot.
My mother was a magistrate in Newbury for 30 years.
She sat on the bench, and she did use those short prison sentences that you're talking about.
I've got to tell you, when someone smashes up the bus stop, when someone repeatedly breaks the law, when someone's found fighting on a Friday or Saturday night, as a magistrate, you've got to have that power for a short prison sentence when you've tried the other remedies.
Gordon Brown is trying to make you believe he can protect health spending, he can protect education spending, he can protect police spending.
He can't do any any of these things, because he's given this country the biggest budget deficit of any developed country in the world.
Helen, I'm not surprised you talk about it in your pub, because it was just a horrendous episode.
As Nick says, it isn't fully finished and sorted out yet.
I know how angry people are in this country.
They pay their taxes and they don't pay their taxes for MPs to abuse the system.
I know how angry I was when I heard about the moats and the duck houses and the rest of it.
I was determined to do my bit to clean it up, to get my MPs to apologise, to get them to pay back money, all of which they did before the official reviews started to happen.
But do you know one thing I think we really need to do as part of the apology, is to say to the British people, we're going to cut the cost of politics.
We're going to cut the size of the House of Commons by 10%. We're going to cut ministers' pay by 5% and freeze it for the whole of the parliament.
We're going to cut the size of Whitehall by a third.
We're going to get rid of some of these quangos.
We're going to make your politics better value for money as well as cleaner.
I think that's part of the apology we really badly need to make.
I want to see a reformed House of Lords.
I think the House of Lords should be predominantly elected.
Gordon, you have had 13 years to sort out the House of Lords.
If there are still hereditary peers sitting in the House of Lords, if you're not happy with the House of Lords, why on earth haven't you done something about it?
You have had all this time.
To suddenly now talk about electoral reform, about changing the voting system which you started doing just weeks before the general election, I think people will see that as a bit of a ploy.
Let me defend once again this idea of cutting the size of the House of Commons.
Who in business, who in public services, who in their family life, hasn't actually had to try and get more for less?
Hasn't had to trim their budgets, hasn't had to work a bit harder?
Why on earth should MPs and parliament be any different?
We could quite as well get by with 10% fewer MPs, we could cut the cost for you, the taxpayer, and we could do a better job at the same time.
Let me just make one point after all that Nick said.
I thought there was a slight danger of a sort of holier than thou.
We should all be frank.
Politics has been in a mess for all of us - we all had MPs with dreadful expenses problems.
There are still three Labour MPs in court at the moment.
There were Liberal MPs that were criticised.
When it comes to party funding, yes, there's been the union money going into Labour from the Unite union.
Yes, the Conservative Party has been too reliant for too long on rich individuals, and yes, the Liberal Democrats took £2.5 million off someone who's still, I think, a criminal on the run and the money hasn't been paid back.
Let's not get too holier than thou over all this.
Have you paid the money back?
Well, it's rather difficult, because Gordon says Nick agrees with Gordon and Nick says Nick doesn't agree with Gordon.
Let me try and find something we're all agreed on that we could change, it would make a difference.
I think it is time that when an MP breaks the rules, that those constituents should be able to throw that member of parliament out of parliament without having to wait for a general election.
I think we all agree about that... ..and whoever wins the next election, we can put that in place straightaway.
I have every sympathy with what you say because education is important, that, as well as getting good grades that actually we're opening young people's minds to all the best things that have been written and all the best things that have been said and to really excite people about education.
I think there is a danger that our education system has become terribly bureaucratic.
We send 4,000 pages of information to schools every year.
We spend £300 million on educational quangos.
We're not getting enough to the frontline, following the child into the school.
As someone who has got two children, one of whom started at a state school in London, and hopefully another child to come, I'm passionate about getting as much money into the school as possible, rather than wasting it in Whitehall.
In terms of exams, we've got to have good external marking, done properly, and high standards.
I think that's absolutely key.
I wouldn't want to see that change.
But let's set the schools free, so we trust in the vocation of the teachers who do what they want - they're there because they have a vocation they care about.
What I'd say in terms of what I care about most in education with my own children going through the system, I want what every parent in this country wants, and it starts with something that actually doesn't necessarily cost money, and that is good discipline in our schools.
In a typical year now, you get 17,000 teachers being attacked by students.
We've got a real problem here.
There was a case in Manchester once where a child produced a knife in a school, got excluded, and then the appeals panel put that child back into the school.
Imagine what that does to the head teacher that's trying to keep order.
So we say head teachers should be able to exclude difficult pupils and not be overruled by appeals panels.
We say you've got to change the rules so teachers can keep order in class.
Right now, we seem to be treating the teacher like children and the children like the adults.
We've got it topsy-turvy, the wrong way round, and we really need to change that so that we have proper discipline and order.
Then people can learn.
Again, we mustn't confuse what goes in in terms of money with what comes out.
I spoke about the fact that we spend £300 million on educational quangos.
The Department of Children, Schools and Families - a lot of teachers actually call it the Department of Curtains and Soft Furnishings because it's so beautifully done up - they recently spent £3 million improving their own building, and putting in a - I'm not making this up - a contemplation suite and a massage room.
As a parent of children at state schools, I want every available penny to go with the child into the school so the teacher can actually provide great education for our children.
There is a lot of waste, and it needs to be cut.
What Gordon Brown isn't telling you is that he's putting up National Insurance contributions on every single job in 2011. The biggest cost schools have is teachers.
So he's going to be taking money out of every single school in the country, primary school, secondary school, FE college.
We say stop the waste in government now so we can stop the lion's share of that National Insurance increase and jobs tax next year.
That's the best way to make sure we keep the money going into the school.
It's simply not true.
I think people can hear that this is a complete invention of a figure plucked out of the air.
We're saying the government could save one pound out of every hundred it spends.
Now, what small business, what large business, what family, frankly, hasn't had to do that during this difficult recession?
This is an absolutely vital question, and I'm glad it's been asked, because we've got to get this economy moving.
We've got to get this economy growing.
What we say is save £6 billion in the coming current year in order to stop the jobs tax which we think will derail the recovery.
Because if you put a tax on jobs, that I think is a jobs killer, it is a recovery killer, it's an economy killer.
A hundred of the leading business people in this country, people who run companies like Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencers and Mothercare have all said that the threat to recovery is not cutting out waste as we say, the threat to recovery is Labour's proposal for a jobs tax.
So I think we've got to remove this dark cloud of a deficit over our economy and it makes sense to make a start on that now.
Make a start this year, to avoid the tax next year, and then we can go forward with further plans to remove our deficit and our debt that will hold our country back if we're not careful.
Let me take on, Robert, this argument directly, the idea that if you cut waste this year, you endanger the recovery.
Just this week, we've seen two I think pretty hideous waste stories.
The first is that civil servants have been given credit cards funded by the tax-payer to go out and spend that on food, wine and other things, and that's cost £1 billion.
The second story was that managers in the National Health Service, many of whom are paid over £250,000, have had a 7% pay rise.
Are we honestly saying that if you didn't have that sort of waste, that sort of excess, that our economy would collapse?
I think it's nonsense.
It's like saying that giving up smoking is somehow going to be bad for your health.
Giving up waste would be good for our economy, and it would mean that we could stop this tax rise that's coming down the track, that Britain's biggest business leaders all say will cost jobs.
Cut the waste, stop the tax.
That's the right answer.
There's no doubt the country's going to have to come together to deal with this really big problem of the deficit.
For every £4 that we spend right now, the government is borrowing one of those pounds.
Nick keeps saying he's being very straight with you.
In his manifesto is a promise for a £17 billion tax cut.
It is a great idea.
I'd love to do it but we don't have £17 billion for a tax cut.
Gordon is saying... £6 billion is one out of every £100 the government spends.
What small business in this recession, what big business hasn't had to make that sort of decision?
Many people are making a much bigger decision.
Turn it round the other way and think about it like this.
Gordon is effectively saying, "I want to go on wasting money now so I put up your taxes later."
Why should we pay our taxes for government waste?
But why do you think it is, I would say, that a hundred of the leading business people in this country, people who run some of the biggest businesses like Corus, like Logica, like Mothercare, why do they say, and they couldn't be more clear, the risk to the economy isn't cutting waste, the risk to the economy is Labour's proposal of a jobs tax.
I just want to make this...
I think people at home watching will find it extraordinary that Gordon Brown is really saying, you've got to go on wasting money to keep the economy going.
Why not cut the waste and stop the tax rise?
It can't be in...
How is a 7% pay rise for NHS managers essential for economic growth?
Sorry, I couldn't see Nick in the audience.
Can you put your hand up?
Ah...
Oh, sorry, you're behind the...
Same problem, behind the camera.
First of all, can I thank you for what you do, and I join with Gordon in paying tribute to our forces.
I've been to Afghanistan in each of the last four years, and just the bravery and the incredible courage and determination of what those men and women do just humbles you every time you see it.
They're not just brave fighters, they are brilliant diplomats in dealing with difficult situations, they're incredible athletes, they are brilliant, brilliant people.
But I don't think we do do enough for them.
I know that steps are being taken to try and improve the situation.
But, frankly, we shouldn't be in the situation we are.
In the last few months, we had to fight a battle in parliament to stop the government cutting the training for the Territorial Army.
I think it's madness when you've got soldiers deployed overseas actually not to invest in your Territorial Army, because they're a very, very important part of our armed services.
We all want to see those things happen, and I think it's an absolutely vital year we're having in Afghanistan.
And you can see, I hope, progress being made but difficult, difficult times lie ahead.
There is something more fundamental we need to do in order to answer your question properly.
That is we've got to have a fundamental defence review of all that we spend and all that we do and all the equipment that we have.
Because if you think about it, over the last decade, since we last did this, we have had 9/11, we have had 7/7 in our own country, we have had the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet we fundamentally haven't asked again, what should be the shape of our army, our navy, our air force?
How can we best defend our country?
How can we best protect our servicemen and women?
We need urgently to do that.
We make sure if we get involved in these conflicts in the future, we don't have the situation where we have had troops on the ground without enough helicopters.
We all know that happened after 2006 and it really wasn't good enough.
Let me answer that directly because I think it's important.
I think the most important duty of any government, anyone who wants to be Prime Minister of this country, is to protect and defend our United Kingdom.
And are we really happy to say that we'd give up our independent nuclear deterrent when we don't know what is going to happen with Iran, we can't be certain of the future in China, we don't know exactly what our world will look like?
I say we should always have the ultimate protection of our independent nuclear deterrent.
That's why we voted to make sure that happened.
We need the defence review, so we can get everything required for the frontline.
I just want to go back to what I think Gordon didn't really tell you, which is, after we deployed in Afghanistan at the end of 2005, for several years, I went each year, and each year, you didn't have to talk to many of our servicemen and women before they told you they simply they didn't have enough helicopters.
To blame it on Taliban tactics, I think, frankly, is misleading.
We didn't have enough helicopters.
We needed more helicopters.
We should have had helicopters.
If the government hadn't cut the helicopter programme back in 2004, we probably would have had more helicopters.
First of all, can I thank you for your incredible service to the NHS.
I think the NHS is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
What it did for my family and for my son, I will never forget.
I went from hospital to hospital, A&Es in the middle of the night, sleeping in different wards in different places.
The dedication, and the vocation and the love you get from people who work in the NHS just, I think, makes me incredibly proud of this country, so thank you for all that you've done.
I think it is special, the NHS, and we made a special exception of the NHS and said yes, there are going to have to be difficult financial decisions elsewhere, but we think that the NHS budget should grow in real terms, i.e., more than inflation, every year under a Conservative government.
My vision is that we improve it, we expand it, we develop it, we make sure that it's got more choice and more control for the patient.
But we need to do some short-term things too, like make cancer drugs available to people to people who need them.
There are some tragic cases now of people not getting what they need.
The point is that today, actually, the number of nurses is going up the number of managers is going up five times faster than the number of nurses in our NHS.
The government has had 13 years to fix these problems, and it hasn't done.
Gordon Brown talks about cancer, but what he's not telling you is that there are people in our country, there was a case the other day of someone who had to sell their home to get the cancer drugs.
And the Prime Minister, the government, is about to hit the NHS, Britain's biggest employer, with this National Insurance rise.
It's going to take £200 million out of our National Health Service.
We say stop that National Insurance rise, and instead spend the money on a cancer drugs fund, so people can get the drugs they need.
Talk about guarantees, but the fact is for some people, waiting two weeks to see a consultant is too long.
We need a faster, choice-driven system, but the drugs have got to be there when you need them.
They're not always right now.
The point is, we have made a special exception for the NHS for exactly the reason that Mrs Neville gives, which is that there are more older people.
There are more expensive treatments.
There are drugs budgets that are going up, and we say you need that extra money to even keep going with the NHS. That's why we make the exception of the NHS and say that's the budget that has to go up.
What Gordon Brown is not telling you about the situation with cancer, cancer drugs and cancer outcomes is, after all the things he's talked about, all the money that's gone in, our death rate from cancer is actually worse than Bulgaria's.
So all that's happened has not actually improved the outcome, which is what matters.
The National Insurance increase which Gordon Brown has said is definitely coming in, that will take £200 million out of the NHS.
He's not replacing that money, so he would have less to spend on cancer drugs.
I have a man in my constituency called Clive Stone who had kidney cancer who came to see me with seven others.
Tragically, two of them have died because they couldn't get the drug Sutent that they wanted, that was on the market, that people knew was a good drug.
That's a scandal in our country today.
So stop the National Insurance rise, use that money for the cancer drugs and help people, so our outcomes can be amongst the best in Europe rather than sadly amongst some of the worst.
Nick Clegg is promising a £17 billion tax cut.
We're saying, stop the waste of £6 billion to stop the National Insurance rise.
I would love to take everyone out of their first £10,000 of income tax, Nick.
It's a beautiful idea, a lovely idea.
We cannot afford it.
Thank you, Alan, for asking this question.
I think it's an absolutely vital question.
I think it's so unfair that today you can have people who have worked hard all their lives, they've saved, they've paid down the mortgage, they've done all the right things, and yet if they go into residential care, they have to spend every penny of that money.
And maybe the neighbour who didn't work hard, didn't save, and went about things in a different way, they get the whole thing paid for for free.
I think that's just not fair.
So we have...
As we know, there is a huge budget deficit, a great big hole left by Gordon Brown, so we can't make all care free, I don't think we can afford that.
What we can do is say to people, if you put aside £8,000 on turning 65, we can guarantee that you won't have to pay for residential care.
That would remove the need to sell your home to pay for care.
It would mean you could pass your home on to your children rather than have to pay for your care bills.
It doesn't solve the whole problem, but I think it'd be a good start, a fair start, in rewarding the people who have done the right thing.
It isn't a small problem about people having to sell their homes to pay for care.
I believe it's 45,000 families every year who have to do that.
As I say, I think there's a deep unfairness in the system.
Look, all of us, when we we get older, want to spend as long as possible at home before going into residential care.
Anything we can do to help people adapt their homes and live in their homes, and also to help the carers, if carers stopped caring in Britain, whether for disabled children or elderly people, if they packed up and gave up, that would cost us £50 billion as well as the hurt and pain it would cause.
So giving carers clearer rights and saying if you care for someone, you should get a break.
The thing every carer says to me more than anything else is, "Give me a break every now and again, and I can go on doing what I do".
I hope as we try and seek some consensus, let's put the carer absolutely up front and centre.
They're Britain's unsung heroes.
I think one of the biggest things we must do is, I think it's right to try and forge a consensus, because this is a long-term issue we must deal with, is to try and give the carer and those they care for more power and control and influence over their lives.
Form an individual budget for each one.
Make sure that if they want to, they can take that as a direct payment, they can make decisions about the sort of respite they need.
We tried to do this with my son, and when you try and get a direct payment system so you're in charge of the money and you can try and get some help, it's unbelievably complicated.
You've got so set up a separate bank account, you've got to read about four lever-arch files.
I found it testing enough.
What someone who's recently had to start caring, who's under huge pressure, maybe getting ill of what they're doing, to try and get direct payments, let's make it easier.
We ought to be trusting people to do this.
Well I think it has been a great opportunity to have this debate.
And I think one of the things I've heard during this debate is just repeated attempts to try and frighten you about a Conservative government.
And I would say, choose hope over fear, because we have incredibly exciting and optimistic plans for the future of our country.
A great vision where we build a bigger society, where we get our economy moving, where we stop Labour's jobs tax which could destroy that economy.
I think it's been shown tonight the idea you have to go on wasting money to secure the recovery is simply wrong.
You heard a lot about policy tonight.
But I think as important as policy is your values.
Let me tell you mine.
If you work hard, I'll be behind you; if you want to raise a family, I will support you.
If you're old and you become ill, we will always be there for you.
This is an amazing country.
We've done incredible things.
I think we can go on and do even more incredible things but we need two things: a government with the right values and also an understanding that we're all in this together and real change comes when we come together and work together.
That's the sort of the change and that's the sort of leadership that I would bring to our great country.