As election fever sweeps through Westminster, William Hague has pledged to cut red tape if the Conservatives win the general election.

The Tory leader unveiled the party's latest advertising campaign at a press conference on Thursday in which he highlighted what he described as "Labour's obsession with targets, plans and bureaucratic controls".

He told journalists: "Under the next Conservative government, nurses will be nurses. They and the doctors they work with will decide who should be treated first based on medical need, rather than spin doctors' targets. Teachers will be teachers. They will spend more time on their pupils and less time responding to Whitehall circulars. Police will police. They will be out on the streets catching criminals, not trapped behind desks hamstrung by bureaucracy and political correctness. People have the right to expect that public services should be held to account."

Shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe added her backing to the campaign.

"Police officers tell me that they cannot do their job effectively. They joined the police to fight crime and catch criminals - and that is what the public want them to do. Instead, they spend hour upon hour filling in forms - and judging from letters to Police Review and surveys of individual forces, the police believe that most of the bureaucracy is unnecessary. The result is rock bottom morale, which the chairman of the Police Federation says is the worst he has ever seen," she said.

Labour dismissed the latest Tory pre-election announcement as nothing new.