Letters | 26 September 2009

Money down the Tube

Sir: Andrew Gilligan’s assessment (‘Chucking millions down the Tube’, 19 September) that for much of the public sector ‘the spending of money has become an end in itself’ is a timely one. Increased investment in public services is both the No. 1 thing Gordon Brown believes he can offer the country and the No. 1 thing he claims to have achieved. As Sir Humphrey put it in Yes, Minister, the Treasury does not work out what it needs and then think how to raise the money. It pitches for as much as it can get away with and then thinks how to spend it. Politicians selling themselves in elections need a way to quantify unquantifiable things, like how good our schools are, or how well our hospitals work, and billion-pound figures sound impressive. Civil servants keen to have bigger budgets to play with are only too happy to indulge their ministers.