NATIONAL BOOKKEEPING. THE House of Commons, on the eve of
the adjourn ment, ordered a return of the total public expenditure on various social services, such. as insurance, pensions, education, public health, housing, poor relief, lunacy, and so forth. It might be thought by those who know how many Blue-books are produced every year that all the information desired in the new return could be easily obtained in existing publications. Such an assumption, however, would be unfounded. The House of Commons order was a significant admission on the part of the Government that the official statistics now published are strangely incomplete and that the intelligent citizen is prevented from finding out how a large part of the revenue is spent. We need hardly say that a well-directed campaign for retrenchment in the public services is scarcely possible so long as it is impossible to find out the precise cost of all these services. The new return will throw light on part of the field and will probably astonish the country by showing how rapidly the expenditure for social purposes has increased in the last twenty or thirty years. But it is only a first step in a very laudable movement, originating in the Royal Statistical Society and the Denison House Committee on Public Assistance, for a thorough reform of our national bookkeeping. The need for this was explained with admirable lucidity in a paper read before the Royal Statistical Society in December, 1916, by Mr. Geoffrey Drage. He gave some surprising examples of the defectiveness of the departmental returns. He said, for instance, that the number of trained British seamen, though a matter of supreme importance, could not be ascertained from the Board of Trade publications and the Census returns. These rival authorities gave particulars about " British seamen "—a term including cooks, cattlemen and even stewardesses—and also about " British sailors," classified as able seamen, seamen, and ordinary seamen, but neither of them could., or did, supply the total number of those trained merchant seamen who played so valiant a part in the war. The figures were so puzzling, Mr. Drage added, that Mr. Buxton, when he was President of the. Board of Trade, was led to state in 1912 that the number of British seamen had increased when, as a matter of fact, they had declined.
Mr. Drage was not content with fault-finding. The remedy, he thought, lay in the establishment of a central statistical department working under the direct control of the Prime Minister. This department would obtain proper returns from all the Government offices and would prepare every year a Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom, for the Empire, and for foreign countries. We should then have trustworthy information concerning all spheres of public activity, instead of having to depend, to a large extent, as at present, upon estimates and guesses at truth by more or less prejudiced people. The least observant reader of the prOceedings of the Coal Commission must have been impressed by the varying character of the figures which were successively produced in regard to the output of coal, the wages paid. and the profits earned. The statements of Sir Eric Geddes, Mr. Chamberlain and other Ministers in regard to the net cost of working the railways under State control have been equally perplexing. If the officials find so much difficulty in arriving at the true facts concerning these industries, it is fairly clear that the statistical methods employed must be at fault. Yet it is obviously essential to a right understanding of the .problem of nationalization that the actual position of the coal industry and of the railways should be plainly stated. We might cite many similar instances in which accurate figures, such as the State alone could compile, are of fundamental importance. But the State has not yet recognized its obligation to the public in this matter. The need for reform, Mr. Drage tells us, was recognized long ago. As far back as 1879 a Treasury Committee, of which Mr. Balfour was a member, reported in favour of establishing a central statistical department. It recommended also that each department should keep the records which it required for office purposes distinct from the statistics which were of general interest to Parliament and the public. Too many of the vast Blue-books printed annually are really designed for official use and not for public information, so that there is a great waste of money, in printing and the object which the Blue-books nominally serve is not attained. Sir Norman Hill showed the other day in the Times that a careful study of the Board of Trade returns of quantities imported led to conclusions widely different from those commonly formed after a glance at the values. The volume of the imports showed, as he said, that distributionhere was gravely defective and accounted to no small extent for the high prices of food and raw materials. Officials often complain that members of Parliament ask for special retains when the details required already exist in published Blue-books. But the fault generally 'lies with the departments, whose publications are so badly compiled and ill-edited that they cannot be used to advantage except by expert civil servants. The old Local Government Board used to be notorious, among those who had occasion to study official statistics, for the obscurity of its voluminous returns, and it is only within recent years that the Board of Trade has shown a desire to present .masses of facts .in an intelligible form. We need hardly say that the advice of the Treasury Committee of 1879 was not taken. Departmental jealousies and Ministerial indifference prevented anything from being done. It remains true to-day, as Mr. W. H. Smith wrote in 1877 when he appointed the Committee, that " it can scarcely be said that at present there is any system at all" in the preparation and presentation of official statistics. Each department goes its own way, the figures returned by one office often fail to accord with those returned by another office, and on many important subjects no information can be obtained.
Hopeful people who are interested in the question think that the return of peace, marking a new era, will smooth the path of this simple, inexpensive and most useful reform. They argue that, as the departments have been shaken up and partly reconstructed and restaffed, the old jealousies which prevented them from co-operating in a common statistical. scheme must have been greatly weakened. We are not so sure of this. The long and unedifying dispute between the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade over the Consular Service and the new Department of Oversea Trade, which is said to have ended, reminds us that departmental quarrels can flourish even in these days greatly to the public disadvantage. The chief hope of improvement lies in the revival of Treasury controL If the Treasury, strongly supported by the Prime Minister, can regain its old power of enforcing economy upon the various departments, it may also compel them to prepare their statistics annually on a uniform and scientific plan and to submit to the supervision of a central statistical office. So far as the United Kingdom is concerned., this programme is entirely practical, if members of Parliament show a continuous interest in it. There is nothing that the departments hate and fear so much as questions in Parliament, repeated at intervals until something is done. Mr. Drage proposed to extend his reform to the statistics of the Empire and of foreign countries. He found that the Dominions have widely different methods. For example, the statistical year, which coincides here and in New Zealand and South Africa with the calendar year, ends with March in Canada and with June in Australia and Newfoundland. Again, the Dominions have different wage of valuing their imports and exports, and publish the returns at different intervals. It will, we fear, be a matte] of some difficulty to set up a uniform practice throughout the Empire. With regard to foreign countries, Belgium before the war initiated an international conference which drew up a model scheme for trade returns and agreed to the establishment of a central office in Brussels, towards the annual expenses of which Great Britain munificently agreed to pay forty-eight pounds. Possibly the League of Nations will take up the question on a somewhat larger scale, when international trade resumes its course. But we need not be diverted by these statistical .ideals from the plain question whether the British Government should not publish every year full and trustworthy information concerning the work of the public departments and the economic and social aspects of the national life. To this question there can only be one answer. The greatest danger faeng democracy is ignorance, and it is the plain duty of the Government to combat this ignoranoe lay.giving the public all the salient facts in a comprehensible form.
Previous page
