A good thing
IN the Treasury the other day I experi- enced a time warp. I was listening peace- ably to the Chief Secretary, John Major, being asked about the undershoot — which is Mandarin for the rare phenomenon of public spending which comes out, as this year, below forecast. What was the Gov- ernment going to do about it? Mr Major was crisp: 'I don't think it would be at all good for financial discipline in public ex- penditure if every time there was an undershoot we rushed out to spend it.' It was at this point that I suddenly travelled ten years backwards through time and was sitting in the same lofty room, listening to Sir Anthony Rawlinson, a Treasury civil servant who foreshadowed many of Sir Humphrey Appleby's better qualities. He was taking us through the 1978 white paper on public spending. Cash limits, the Treas- ury's new weapon, had temporarily fright- ened the spending departments into sub- mission, and the figures showed it. Sir Anthony was giving Mandarin answers to recondite questions, and it was half an hour before I could get in my own ques- tion, which was not recondite at all: 'Sir Anthony, I now understand that the public sector has spent less money than the Treasury expected. What I can't make out is whether the Treasury thinks that is a good thing or a bad thing.' Sir Anthony's long face became even longer. 'The Treas- ury', he said, 'is never pleased when its forecasts do not correspond to events.' It was a turning-point, the moment of oppor- tunity missed. In the next year the spend- ing departments were encouraged to catch up, and public spending, mostly on pay (46 per cent more for senior civil servants), made good its escape. An awful warning.
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