Four weeks into the new Prime Minister's reign, MP for Chipping Barnet Theresa Villiers takes a look at what he's done.

During his first month as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made a series of grand statements and promises. However, as we have learned with his stealth taxes and pensions raid, you have to check the small print to discover what he is really up to.

In July, the Government announced new funding for flood defences. Gordon Brown said that the budget for flood defences 'will now rise from £600million to £800m' (Downing Street press conference, July 23).

In fact, the small print of the statement given to Parliament revealed that the additional £200m funding would not be introduced for four years, until 2011.

It also emerged that Mr Brown had actually frozen the Environment Agency's budget just weeks before the floods (Freedom of Information Act request, Environment Agency). Last year's flood defence bill was cut by £15m to make cost savings after chaos at the Rural Payments Agency left the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs £200m in the red.

Mr Brown deliberately referred only to 'capital projects' because, in fact, he'd cut spending on non-capital items like flood defence planning and essential staff.

Mr Brown also claimed he would reduce his powers as Prime Minister. On the very same day as he made this promise, he slipped out a new version of the Ministerial Code, which governs the ethical conduct of ministers, on an obscure government website giving him increased powers to block investigations into ministerial wrongdoing.

Even more worrying, he has lifted the ban on civil servants attending party political events, such as Labour Party conferences - raising new questions about the politicisation of the civil service.

The Prime Minister told Parliament that a review of the NHS in London was 'not proposing the closure of existing hospitals'. Buried in the detail of the government review published on the same day, his new health minister, Lord Darzi, announced that 'the days of the district general hospital... are over', and that there was a need for 'fewer, more advanced hospitals' in London (Health Care for London: A Framework for Action).

The Government also said: "Yes, we can give you an assurance that we will not build on Green Belt land. We are not proposing any changes to our very robust protection of the Green Belt" (10 Downing Street spokesman, Lobby Briefing, July 10, 2007).

In fact, it emerged that a report commissioned by Labour ministers, from planning experts Roger Tym & Partners, warned the Government that its policies would 'increase pressure to develop in the Green Belt'; have a 'significant negative impact on the Green Belt'; 'increase the risk of flash flooding'; and 'increase pressure to develop in these areas of flood risk' (Augmenting the Evidence Base for the Examination in Public of the South East Plan, May 2006).

These are just a few of the examples of where what the Prime Minister does is very different from what he says. So, no matter how many times he talks about a 'new government', he is still sticking to the same tricks that he used in his Budgets to pull the wool over people's eyes and disguise year-on-year tax hikes.