A few days ago, I found myself yet again involved in the long-running saga of Local Spending Reports.
What, you may ask, are Local Spending Reports?
This is a highly pertinent question, since the answer is that at present there aren’t any.
Lest, dear reader, you should think I have finally taken leave of my senses, I should add that even though there aren’t any of these objects in existence, there are meant to be. The Sustainable Communities Act gives ministers the duty to publish comprehensive Local Spending Reports for every area of the country. .
The idea is simple. In West Dorset and every other part of the country, there are dozens of government departments and quangos happily spending taxpayers’ money on projects of one kind and another. But, at present, no-one has any way of knowing how much they are spending locally. The Sustainable Communities Act gives ministers a duty to publish reports that will show what each such central government department and quango is spending in each area, and what they are spending it on.
Many months have now passed since the Sustainable Communities Act became law. But very little information has, so far, been published by the Department concerned.
So we had a debate in Parliament about it, and we asked the Secretary of State why there was such a delay.
The debate had the unusual characteristic of being extremely, though unintentionally amusing.
The amusement consisted in the speech that Sir Humphrey had written for the Secretary of State. This was a speech designed to explain why it had not been possible to produce reports showing how much all the various government departments had spent in each of the areas of the country.
You can imagine the sort of stuff: problems of allocation … difficulties of interpretation … questions of judgement … all very weighty and difficult.
What made this Yes, Minister speech particularly jolly was that all of these figures which the speech explained it wasn’t possible to produce have actually been produced in various parts of the country as part of a separate and parallel government scheme called “Total Place”.
This is a scheme in which the Treasury is trying to get all the bodies that spend money in West Dorset (and elsewhere) to talk to one another to find out whether they are spending money on the same thing, or whether they could spend less money if they combined forces. Miraculously, despite all the problems raised by Sir Humphrey, when the Treasury asked various parts of the country to do this, it turned out that all the bodies in question are actually able to provide all of the data which in Sir Humphrey ‘s eloquent explanation couldn’t possibly be provided.
Discovery of this fact didn’t actually require any degree of rocket science. Once I had been told that the statistics for West Dorset existed (even though I have not yet been able to lay hands on them) a little searching around on the amazing item called the internet (which Sir Humphrey has not yet heard about) revealed that all the figures for Cumbria have actually been published by … Cumbria.