Cameron: UK paying price for Labour

In a speech to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Tory leader said the country has been run by a regime of "management consultant and powerpoint presentation".

The result, he said, has been the closure of post offices, libraries, police stations, small shops, and small schools with GP surgeries the latest to come under threat.

"For the last decade or so, in the name of modernisation, rationalisation and efficiency, we have been living under a regime of government by management consultant and policy by powerpoint," he insisted.

"The result has not been a contented, streamlined nation humming with efficiency and gleaming with modernity.

"The result has been an explosion of bureaucracy, cost and irritation, endless upheavals and pointless reorganisations, the elbowing aside of colourful, human, informal relationships based on common sense and trust in favour of the grey, mechanical, joyless mantras of the master planner with his calculations, projections and impact assessments."

The outcome has been not just "socially destructive" but also "economically inefficient", undermining institutions that are the foundations of our society and creating extra costs for the state to pick up.

"All this because we live under a regime that prizes bureaucratic neatness above all else. A regime - indeed a whole culture that it has spawned - which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing," he said.

Mr Cameron promised that, in contrast, a Conservative government would attempt to develop a measure or series of measures of social value which will inform its policy-making in power.

"When making decisions, ministers will take account not just of economic efficiency but also social efficiency," he said. "So with a Conservative government, the strengthening of society will be at the heart of government action."