When George Osborne stands up for the autumn statement on 25 November, remember this figure: £60bn.

Why? Because that is his deficit.

Not the budget gap caused by the global financial crisis. Not the deficit he says he inherited. That is the Osborne deficit.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, it is the gap between what – in his emergency budget of June 2010 – he said he would save, and the amount he actually managed to. He missed his own target by £60bn.

And when you hear about his new plan for tax credits, recall this fact: the Osborne deficit is twice (yep, two whole times) the entire annual spend on tax credits. Not twice the amount he wants to cut, but two times the total budget for those payments.

Crucial too is his record on using reductions in welfare spending to cut the deficit. Analysis by academics at the LSE shows that all cuts in welfare during the last parliament were offset by tax giveaways elsewhere. For almost every pound saved from the social security budget that hit those with less, a quid was handed out somewhere else. So no wonder then that Osborne failed on his own deficit target. But it really is a disgrace, though, that his economic mismanagement now causes such stress and worry, hanging over families, just before the festive season.

Let me give you an example. Stephen from Wirral works full time as a carer for a local charity doing a job that is highly skilled, but not highly paid. He is already under immense pressure looking after vulnerable people. He is the only earner for his family, and the planned tax credit cuts will cause real hardship. He will still be working very hard, but his family will have to try and cope.

Just one family out of those that I have listened to in recent weeks. But a situation similar to that faced by millions. For those that did support Osborne and David Cameron, is this really what the British people though they were voting on in May? Or did the rhetoric on welfare catch them out? Or maybe they thought that Cameron would be too shamefaced to promise one thing, and do another.

Now, the chancellor has claimed previously that wages can do all the poverty-ending work that tax credits can. This is just plain wrong. Wages cannot take account of family circumstances. Could a care charity, retailer or hotel chain (sectors where low pay is a feature) be expected to pay more to those with kids? Hardly. That is why the Beveridge plan that established social security recognised the extra costs of bringing up children.

To be cavalier about this fact, as Osborne has been, would seem bad enough to you if you are in a family where there are two parents, both earning, but on lower pay. But if one parent cannot go to work for reasons beyond their control, or for single parents, then options to make up the differences in lost tax credits must look near impossible.

So, for those parents, how must it feel to know that – given all his lectures about hard work and responsibility – the chancellor has fallen short of his own targets by a whopping £60bn.

And that is why the only acceptable response from the chancellor to his tax credit nightmare must be complete reversal of his planned cuts.

George Osborne says cuts are necessary because of his deficit. But, as I have explained, if he had done better himself, not a penny of these cuts would be necessary. He only needed to have bettered his record from 2010 to 2015 by a mere £5bn – less that 10 per cent – and he could cancel the changes to tax credits entirely.

Osborne’s incompetence, his overpromising and underdelivery, is the reason for the tax credits cuts. And it will be hard for families in Britain to trust that any solution or compromise he comes up with, given his record.

That is why the only fair resolution to this is to drop the changes to tax credits. Mums and dads across the UK cannot magic out of thin air more hours at work, just a few weeks before Christmas. But we in the Labour movement can keep heaping the pressure on the Tories to stop this attack on working people.

That is the only outcome that is fair.

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Alison McGovern MP is chair of Progress and a former shadow minister. She tweets @Alison_McGovern