Helping the medicine go down a different throat

Tweet

 

As I remember childhood, being given a spoonful of sugar with, or immediately after taking, some particularly unpleasant medication was a common practice. Today’s health experts probably wouldn’t approve of giving a child a spoonful of pure sugar in any circumstances, but then medicines tend not to be so foul-tasting these days, and have largely been replaced by bland taste-free pills of one sort or another anyway. I’m aware of no circumstances, though, under which the spoonful of sugar would have been given to a completely different child instead of the one who was suffering from whatever disease was being treated.

But then I’m not Chancellor of the Exchequer, so what would I know? According to modern economic theory of the Reevesian kind, spending £2 billion to build 18,000 affordable homes for one group of people will sweeten the pill represented by the £5 billion in benefits being removed from an entirely different and much larger group of people. It’s an ‘interesting’, if somewhat unscientific, proposition, but it would never survive the sort of thorough testing required for the acceptance of any new approach to medical treatment, with its concomitant stress on empirical data. It also looks unlikely to survive the rather less thorough (and completely untested) implementation which is about to happen. It makes sense only as an exercise in dividing people into groups and encouraging them to blame other groups for any problems they might have.

Could we really do any worse?

Tweet

 

Leaving aside the colourful language with which the English Education Secretary expressed herself in an unguarded moment yesterday, what came through was a belief that parents should be extremely grateful to the current government for acting after previous governments had done nothing about the issue. If you assume, as the English constitution does, that a new Prime Minister equals a new government, and that a new government cannot be held responsible for the actions of its predecessors, then she almost has half a point. In the real universe, the one most of us inhabit, it’s rather more clear that the problem has been building up for years, and that successive Tory governments have cut back school building and refurbishment. At the moment it’s perceived as being primarily an English problem, but that is at least partly down to the fact that the English government has been slow and reluctant to share information about its findings. And when it comes to putting things right, we will come up against the fact that English spending on rectification works directly impacts the amount available in Wales, through the application of the Barnett formula. It’s hard to believe that similar construction methods weren’t used as widely in Wales as in England, and that there aren’t more problems waiting to be exposed.

That rectification will be costly, on which note Sunak wants us to be grateful, apparently, that he only cut the rate of building new or replacement schools down to 50 a year when he was Chancellor, a level in line with what had happened under the previous (also Tory) administration, and despite the fact that he was being told that the government needed to plan to replace at least 400 a year. Even that higher figure is inadequate to meet the need. England, we are told, has 22,000 schools: assuming that the planned lifetime of each school is 40 years, then 550 need to be replaced every year just to stand still. A replacement rate of 50 every year implies a planned average building lifetime of 440 years. In Wales, there are around 1470 schools; if the replacement rate were to match that in England (<0.25% per annum), there would be a similar requirement for buildings to last hundreds of years.

Whilst this might appear an entirely normal expectation to Wykehamists like Sunak (where some buildings date back to 14^th Century) or Old Etonians (some date back to 1440), it really isn’t applicable to the schools most children attend. There certainly are many buildings more than a century old (indeed, my old primary school was built in 1908 and is still in use) and, arguably, there is no great rush to replace them all on grounds of imminent collapse (although I still remember the incident in the late 1950s when the ceiling in one of our classrooms fell down – we had some time off while they assessed the rest). They were built to last. But whether schools designed and built in an era when children sat at individual desks in neat rows in strictly delineated classes are still entirely suitable for delivering the modern curriculum is a more complex question, to say nothing of the number of them which have some classes in demountable buildings installed as a ‘temporary’ measure decades ago. The problems which have emerged over the past week are largely in the (comparatively) newest schools, built from the 1960s on, which were deliberately built not to last that long in order to save on building costs at the time (and, although the problem identified is with the concrete, it would be a mistake to blithely assume that that was the only lifetime-limiting factor with the materials and methods used). The extent to which building cheaply to last just a few decades makes sense depends largely on whether there is a long term plan in place for eventual replacement. And there isn’t, and never has been. That isn’t just a Tory problem; governments of all colours have just assumed that the quoted lifespan was some sort of guaranteed minimum, rather than an accurate assessment, and made no plans for a rolling programme of rebuilding. It makes the economic projections for government expenditure look ‘better’ (i.e. lower), although it does somewhat divorce them from reality when this sort of need arises.

It’s not entirely unfair of the Welsh government to say that their ability to deal with the problem is constrained by London, although that’s not something which the perpetually and professionally angry leader of the Welsh Tories is ever likely to admit. They have, perhaps, been too ready to do nothing until England suddenly announced the problem, but there is little that they can do about the funding issue until England acts. And Hunt’s statement that they will do whatever it takes as long as it doesn’t cost any more tells us already that English action will be inadequate. Both questions (waiting for England to lead on identifying the problem, and depending on English decisions for funding) underline the issue at the heart of ‘devolution’; real power remains elsewhere. There is, of course, no guarantee than an independent Welsh government would have done any better (although it couldn’t have done much worse). But we in Wales wouldn’t be able to blame anyone else, and would have to take responsibility both for the problem and fixing it. That would surely be an improvement on where we are now.

Undelivered promises are cost-free

Tweet

 

Members of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet are apparently getting increasingly restless about his penchant for making costly announcements about things that they are going to do without telling them first, let alone consulting with them. According to this story in the Sunday Times (paywall), the Chancellor, in particular, is now starting to ask where the money is going to come from, and the Guardian reports, more generally, that Cabinet meetings have become a formality with no debate and that ministers are feeling sidelined.

However, like Thatcher’s vegetables, Ministers are failing to understand what is expected of them. World kings don’t need to consult with anyone, they have the absolute right to do as they wish; mere courtiers simply need to fall into line and do as they are told. They may not like the monstrous and narcissistic ego ignoring their views, but they helped to put him there, and under the UK’s semi-democracy, he could replace them at any time, if only it didn’t require him to take a decision first.

And that unwillingness to take decisions brings us to another thing that Ministers, to say nothing of the media, are not understanding. The nature of boosterism has nothing to do with taking decisions or actually spending money at all. It’s just about PR and making announcements. Announcing grand schemes and lots of spending earns headlines, often positive, as the words of Johnson are faithfully reported by a sycophantic media as though they contained some meaning. But for Johnson, the headline itself is the payoff. People adding up the cost of his announcements are missing the point: pledges which he has no intention of delivering cost nothing. There is no plan for social care, there will not be a tunnel between Great Britain and Ireland – let alone a giant roundabout under the Isle of Man – and there probably won’t be a new boat either. Just like there will be no ‘Boris Island’ in the Thames Estuary, or garden bridge in the centre of London. Levelling up is a slogan, not a plan, and neither health nor education will receive as much funding as they need to catch up after the pandemic. And his rejection of further austerity doesn’t mean that he isn’t planning cuts to public spending, merely that he’s going to call it something else.

The ratio of cost to truthfulness in any promise made by Johnson is 1:1 –  which means that zero truthfulness translates into zero cost. The real question is why anybody else – let alone the Ministers working most closely with him – takes anything he says at face value. He just wants us all to remember the headlines and forget the substance. Sadly, years of making up stories as a reporter give him reasonable cause to believe that many will do just that.

Refurbishing on the cheap

Tweet

 

Downing Street’s shiny new media briefing room made its first operational appearance yesterday, and it left me wondering how on earth they could have spent £2.6 million on doing it up. Not “how could they?” in the sense of moral and fiscal outrage, but “how could they?” in practical, down to earth reality. The average price of a home in Wales is now a little over £200,000, so that sum of money expended on one room could have purchased 12 whole houses – what do you have to do to spend that on refurbishing a single room?

There are certainly some nice new chairs for absent journalists not to sit on. I don’t know how many – but let’s say there were 200 of them. £100 each would be expensive, but let’s imagine they purchased them from a Tory donor at an inflated price of £500 each – that’s the first £100,000 gone. Those podiums look expensive – perhaps they are hand-carved solid oak, at a very pricy £20,000 each: that brings us to a running total of £160,000. That nice blue screen can surely not have cost more than £100,000, and if we allow £5,000 each for two flags of the very best quality, that brings us up to £270,000. I couldn’t see the carpet, but it’s a large room, so perhaps another £100,000? And then there’s the IT and audio-visual equipment. They clearly didn’t go overboard on that, given that Chris Whitty still had to ask someone else to change the slides for him and remote clickers are no more than about £20 each, but let’s allow another generous £200,000 for the technical gubbins. Throw in an expensive repaint at £20,000, and that gives us a running total of £590,000. They probably needed a design consultant. Given the government’s willingness to overpay for dubious advice, let’s assume that they employed one at £5,000 per day for four weeks to design and oversee the installation. That adds another £100,000 to the cost. There were no obvious signs of gold plating à la Trump, or Middle Eastern potentate style marble, so what happened to the remaining almost £2 million? And why does nobody seem even to be asking?

Perhaps they outsourced the whole job to one of their friends who took a 300% profit margin; perhaps there were some dubious ‘commissions’ paid. Who knows, but in the world inhabited by the majority of us, spending £2.6 million on one room would not only be difficult to justify, but it would also be almost impossible to achieve. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that the government believes that the public finances are strapped at present, and that they had to operate on such a tight budget.

We're not the target audience

Tweet

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which, for reasons that are dubious to say the least, has become the ‘go-to’ organisation for the media when it comes to government economics, has been very critical this week of the two Tory leadership candidates, accusing them of misleading the public with their extravagant spending pledges.  This seems to me to be more than a little unfair, for two reasons.

Firstly, the IFS always take a very conservative (with both a small and a large ‘c’) view on government finance.  Their opinions are based on the orthodox but mistaken view that the government must, in essence, ‘balance the books’; that taxation and spending must match over an appropriate timescale.  In fairness, that has also been the position of both the major UK parties for some years; austerity (and let us not forget that Labour never really opposed austerity, just wanted a different form of it) is but the most obvious result of that.  Orthodox it might be, but it has always been a nonsense.  It was a pretext for the ideological aim on the part of the Tories of shrinking the state and Labour went along with the principle in the hope of avoiding potentially damaging criticism of their alleged financial profligacy (from organisations like the IFS, the BBC etc).  It was always an ideological choice, though, and all the wild spending pledges of Johnson and Hunt have done is to expose what has always been the reality, namely that government spending is not at all like household finances.  (None of that means, of course, that whoever wins the race will not then try and put the cat back into the bag.)

But secondly, neither Johnson nor Hunt are trying to mislead the public at this stage; they are only trying to mislead the membership of the Conservative party (along with the UKIP/Farageist entryists) who have a vote in the leadership election.  They don’t need to mislead the public yet; that can wait until the general election in the autumn.  In the meantime, they only need to convince a comparatively tiny number of people; the public are just the ‘accidental’ audience of a race which is using the media to reach that small number of people.  Whether the candidates’ increasingly wild promises will convince even those people is an open question; the electorate for this race is after all composed largely of people who have swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the household budget analogy.  I rather suspect that the promises to drastically cut taxes whilst hugely increasing spending will have little effect on that target audience.  It’s a bidding war which is not only unnecessary, but also largely futile; these aren’t the issues on which that electorate will make its choice.

Some Tory bystanders such as Patten and Hammond are becoming increasingly alarmed at the prospect that all Johnson and Hunt are succeeding in doing is legitimising the more modest spending commitments of the Labour Party.  I’m not sure that they need to be over-worried; the way things are going, the irony is that it will be the Labour Party at the next election which is arguing for financial orthodoxy, and which will take the electoral hit which is otherwise due to damage the Tories.  And if the Tories repeat such wild promises in a manifesto for a General Election and then win – well, no-one will really expect Boris Johnson to honour a promise, will they? 

Doubling down on the lies

Tweet

Apparently, Goebbels never actually said that "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”, although he’s frequently quoted as having done so.  It seems that he believed that truth made for better propaganda.  He did, though, write this: "The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." 

It is, of course, unfair to smear a whole nation in such a way, but that doesn’t mean that one can’t find individuals who fit the bill.  Boris Johnson, for example.  The infamous slogan on the side of that big bus has been debunked time and time again, but Boris is like the arsonist who cannot help returning to the scene of his crime.  Last week, he told us that the figure was indeed wrong – it should have been higher.  But then, looking ridiculous is nothing new to Boris, especially if he has some union flags to wave at the same time.

There are, at least, some Tories who seem to have enough honesty to be at least a little embarrassed by such misleading claims.  The Maldwyn MP, Glyn Davies, repeated at the weekend his previous suggestion “Let’s agree to invest £350 million per week more into health and social care” as a means of lancing the damaging sore which the inflated claim has caused.

I don’t know whether that would work or not; it might, but it would also undermine the claim that we can’t find the money for the NHS if we want to, a claim which is central to the government’s policy.  Glyn Davies claims that it would ‘shoot the fox’; but it seems to me it would also be shooting both his government (and himself) in the foot by exposing the other great lie, which is about government finances and what is possible within them – which is why the government is unlikely to follow his advice, preferring to twist in the wind as the bus promise continues to haunt them all.

He starts his piece by saying “The stark reality is that it will never be possible for the NHS to meet the demands of a growing population, an aging population, and the irresistible costly advance of clinical science.” which is a wholly unevidenced assertion based on his, and his party’s, own priors about levels of spending and taxation.  The claim that the government can and should simply add £350 million a week to the NHS budget with no attempt to identify the source of such funds is enough to fatally undermine the assertion.

We can have the health service we want, with or without Brexit (although it’s probably easier without Brexit given the likely damage to overall government finances in the first few years after leaving the EU).  It is ideology, not economics, which prevents that.  Repeated often enough, the big lie that it can’t be done will also end up making the liars look ridiculous.

Crossing a line

Tweet

I’ve never been a fan of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, and I don’t understand why the media give them so much attention.  They are a self-appointed group who have decided that taxpayers’ interests are best served by opposing any and every item of government expenditure, rather than taking a balanced view about the costs relative to the benefits.

Their figures usually come from the submission of Freedom of Information requests; in this case, it was based on one submitted by a Conservative AM, whose party generally seems to share the Alliance’s ideological opposition to government expenditure of any kind.  Once they have their numbers, they then spin them into a press release which the media dutifully report, usually verbatim, as part of their daily onslaught against any type of public service in pursuit of their ideological aim of eliminating most government expenditure.

In today’s piece, they have excelled themselves.  Of course, any expenses paid to public servants need to be scrutinised (whatever Paul Flynn may say), but that is no different from the position in any private enterprise.  In the course of doing their jobs, some staff will need to travel, and there are costs associated with that.  Given the size of the undertaking, an annual expenditure of around £250,000 by the Welsh Government on staff travelling costs doesn’t immediately strike me as being excessive in total.

I certainly don’t believe that it justified the claim that these expenses are being racked up by “… a very small group of individuals intent on bleeding the public purse dry”.  I thought that was a pretty offensive statement to be making; the spokesman seems to have been carried away by his own oratory.  I’m not convinced that the slew of stories which appears regularly based on FoI requests actually adds anything to political debate; in this case, it’s just a bit of nastiness directed at people trying to do their jobs.

Revealing old news

Tweet I’m not a big fan of newspaper stories which contain the words “we can reveal” in their first sentence.  Rarely, if ever, is that which precedes or follows the words (depending on journalistic style) much of a revelation in practice.  The Western Mail has excelled itself today, however, although only the inside story seems to be on their website, not the more senstaionalist front page intro.

Their ‘revealed truth’, which is that councils can and do sell copies of the electoral register, turns out not to be ‘news’ at all.  In fact, as the quote from the WLGA spokesman confirms, this has been done since at least 1832, and maybe longer.  I would not have believed that any newspaper would present news which is at least 180 years old as such a big story if I hadn’t read it myself.  And they submitted 22 FoI requests to councils as a basis for this story.

I think that I can safely ‘reveal’, without needing to submit a single FoI request, that there has been some wastage of public money involved with these FoI requests.  I don’t expect to see that story splashed on the front page though.

Not so obvious

Tweet

On first reading, yesterday’s report in the Western Mail, that Wales’ health boards do not know how many patients are receiving radiotherapy treatment, nor what the cost of that treatment is, seemed quite ‘shocking’ or ‘staggering’ to use some favourite words from politicians’ press releases.  It seems inherently obvious that they ought to know such things, doesn’t it?  But then I remembered a dictum of one of my old science teachers – “that which is obvious isn’t necessarily true”.

Jumping from an inability to answer some very specific questions about the detail of expenditure on one particular type of treatment to an accusation of ‘financial ineptitude’ as the leader of the Lib Dems has done might make for good headlines, but doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.  There are, as anyone managing a large budget will know, many different ways of analysing expenditure in order to manage and control it; an inability to respond to a newspaper’s request to analyse it in one particular way does not, in itself, mean that there is a lack of control.

One of the challenges for those managing a large and complex organisation like the NHS is to ensure that they concentrate their attention on key information, and don’t get drowned in mere data.  Finding the right balance can be harder than it looks.  I don’t know whether they’ve got the balance right or not – and yesterday’s story gave me no help at all to improve my understanding.  The most that I can say is that there are some questions which the external auditors ought to look at to satisfy themselves that expenditure is being properly controlled.

What I do know is that ensuring that data is kept in a format which will enable any and every question to be answered on demand is not likely to be the most productive use of resources.  And those criticising the inability to answer this particular question seem to have complained often enough in the past about the numbers of bureaucrats and managers in the NHS.  Asking for more detailed record-keeping seems inconsistent to say the least.

Oscar Wilde described a cynic as “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.  I don’t want a health service which simply ignores price issues; but I do want one which understands value as well.

How long a piece of string?

Tweet

According to the Tories’ group leader, £4million a year is an ‘excessive and wasteful’ sum of money to spend on maintaining Wales’ largest occupied office building.  So, if £4million is the ‘wrong’ answer, what’s the ‘right’ one? 

Actually, he wasn’t quite as precise as that.  He said only that he ‘fears’ that it is excessive and wasteful, which sort of suggests that he himself doesn’t actually know what the right answer would be.  Select a number, any number, as long as it’s smaller, perhaps?  (‘Zero’ would be quite a good answer from his perspective, one suspects.)

There is, in the way his views are expressed, an underlying suggestion that civil servants should not expect to have high quality office accommodation – that is to be reserved for the private sector.  And if their conditions deteriorate over time, and no longer meet current standards and expectations, then they should simply accept that as part of the package.  Whilst we shouldn't be paying for anyone to work in opulent surroundings, it is surely reasonable for them to expect to be working in modern conditions which comply with current standards, isn't it?

It’s interesting that he claims that the money could be better used in supporting businesses, as in “There are untold numbers of businesses in Wales that would benefit from financial support”.  I’m sure that there are.  But is he really saying that he’d prefer to see taxpayers’ money used to give grants and subsidies to businesses rather than to purchase services and materials from them?  Because that’s where most of the £4million will actually have gone – to private companies in return for work done.  Providing state handouts rather than giving business to companies is an odd position for a Tory to take.

I don’t know whether £4 million is excessive or not.  It sounds a lot, but there also seems to be an element of catch-up after some years of neglect.  I simply don’t have enough information to judge.  And neither, I suspect, do the Tories. 

There’s nothing new in their approach though.  Far too often, opposition politicians seize on any large numbers which come into view because they make good headlines.  But headline chasing isn’t the same as detailed scrutiny and constructive opposition.  Nor is it the best way of ensuring that those who work in public services on behalf of all of us have suitable, but not extravagant, working conditions.

More on 'funding gaps'

Tweet

MH at Syniadau points out a mathematical howler in an article by the Lib Dem policy officer on WalesHome today.  In fairness, it isn’t the first time that I’ve seen the ‘average spend per pupil in Wales is £600 less than in England’ turned into ‘Wales spends £600 less on every child’, which I suspect is at the root of the error.  Not everyone understands the difference between the two statements (although Policy Officers should).

Misunderstanding what the so-called funding gap is telling us is pretty common, sadly.  I’ve seen more than one politician trying to claim that the gap can be plugged by switching spending from the central local authority costs, and passing the money direct to schools.  But the statistical paper which indentified the size of the gap makes it clear that the gap is not an expression of the differences in the amounts reaching schools, it’s an expression of the total spend on education per pupil. 

Passing a greater proportion of total spend to schools may, or may not, be a good thing; there are a range of issues to consider.  But the Local Authority central costs are already included in the comparison, and giving individual schools in Wales a higher proportion of the lower total Welsh budget does absolutely nothing to close the ‘funding gap’.  It can be closed only in two ways – increasing Welsh total educational spend, or decreasing English total educational spend.

Certainly, the use of PFI in England will be one factor leading to a greater educational spend – where it has been used, the total costs of providing equivalent premises will be higher.  That’s no reason to emulate the English spending pattern, though.  It simply indicates that different approaches to financing can make the figures less comparable. 

(And, as an aside, Plaid Cymru are proposing a change, the side effect of which may well be to increase the apparent ‘funding gap’ by taking the cost of providing school buildings out of the education budgets.  It doesn’t actually mean a reduction in spending though; it might just look like one in the relevant stats.)

My real criticism of the approach being taken by the Lib Dems to the ‘funding gap’ is that they only seem to be looking at the spend, not the effect of the spend.  For all I know, the English spend could be higher because they’re just running the education service less efficiently, and if that were true, it certainly would not follow that our school children are losing out as a result.  For a party which has made ‘cutting unnecessary expenditure’ the keynote of its campaign, calling for an increase in spending on any service purely because England spends more seems more than a little incongruous.

I don’t know whether we’re spending enough on education to give our children the start in life they need and deserve.  I suspect not, but simply comparing our expenditure with someone else’s is never going to answer that question satisfactorily.

More bad news on education

Tweet

Yet another report on education this week draws attention to the ways in which our education services are failing our children.  Yet another wake-up call according to the Minister.  I wonder, though, about some of the reaction to the stream of reports highlighting the issues. 

It may well be that a reorganisation of the way education is managed will give more strategic leadership to the sector, as well as generating some savings on overheads.  But management reorganisations have a habit of diverting attention from the front line whilst they are in progress, as people manoeuvre for new jobs, and the history of reorganisations in the public sector does not exactly paint a clear picture of effective cost reduction.

There also seems to be some misunderstanding of the so-called ‘funding gap’ between English and Welsh schools, and the impact any reorganisation might have on that.  Clearly, a reduction in ‘overhead costs’, if it really could be achieved, would potentially free up more cash to go direct to schools; but it would not necessarily have any impact on the funding gap.

As the Welsh Government report which identified the size of the gap pointed out, “Education spend per pupil … is not a measure of 'schools' expenditure per pupil as the only way of making a consistent comparison over time with England is to include adult and youth education expenditure and use overall education spend. The reason for calculating education spend per pupil is therefore solely for the purpose of making a comparison with England.”, and “The figures include expenditure on schools services, LA central costs, mandatory student awards, inter-authority education recoupment, nursery schools and adult and youth education”.

So the costs of 22 education departments are already factored into the comparison, and a re-allocation of funds within the education spend will have no impact on the comparison with England.  To reduce the gap means that the total education budget would need to be increased – anyone proposing that in current circumstances needs to spell out which other spending would then be cut to compensate, because there’s certainly not going to be a large pot of extra money available.

I’m still unconvinced about the relationship between ‘spend’ and ‘outcomes’, in any event.  Whilst there ought, intuitively, to be a relationship of some sort, it is not a straight line relationship, as pointed out in comments on a previous post.  The lowest spend per pupil in Wales is in the Vale of Glamorgan, which achieves some of the best results, and the second highest spend is in Blaenau Gwent, which achieves some of the worst results.  That suggests to me that social factors – and particularly relative wealth – are at least as important as determinants as the amount of money being spent.  That in turn suggests that whilst reorganising the management and increasing the spend might look like decisive action, the real action needed is much more about tackling the underlying inequalities - and thus has little to do with the education portfolio at all.

Creating jobs

Tweet

With an election on the horizon, and the economic situation in which Wales finds itself likely to be a key factor, it is no surprise to find that politicians’ thoughts turn to ideas for boosting the economy and creating jobs.

I’ll admit that I was highly sceptical of the promise made by Hain, on behalf of Labour, during the last election that Labour would create 50,000 jobs in Wales.  It’s not that we don’t need the jobs, more that I’m not sure that politicians and government can actually ‘create’ jobs at all, other than by increasing taxes and employing people directly. 

It is surely more than pure coincidence that Plaid’s promise to create jobs alights on the same number, 50,000, (albeit with the added bonus of 30,000 promised apprenticeships).  But my innate scepticism about what governments can achieve doesn’t magically disappear just because the source is different.

Some would argue that economic performance is simply not terribly amenable to being improved by government policy at all, as this research suggests.  I wouldn’t support taking a fatalistic approach on that basis, though.  We expect politicians to have answers to problems, and they will always oblige by telling us what their solutions are.  But we do need to exercise an appropriate degree of care before simply accepting any figures which are put forward for primarily electoral purposes.

Betsan Powys pointed out some confusion as to the mechanism actually being proposed.  And, rather than debating whether the idea of finding a creative way around Treasury rules to get hold of £500m to invest in Welsh infrastructure is a good one or not, the other parties seem to be more interested in demolishing the idea because of the detail of the approach proposed and the idea’s provenance rather than on its merit.

But leaving aside – for the moment at least – the question as to whether the establishment of such a fund is practicable, the more important questions are surely whether such a fund, if it could be established, would enable investment of the sums suggested, or could have the effect of creating the numbers of jobs suggested.

On the jobs issue, I’m not entirely convinced by the numbers.  That an investment of £500million in infrastructure developments in Wales would create, or at least safeguard, jobs in the short term is irrefutable, but how many and for how long?  £500m invested to create up to 50,000 jobs looks like something of a bargain – it implies that one job can be created for each £10,000 of direct capital spend in the public sector. 

That’s a rather better return on investment than either Objective One Funding or Convergence Funding have achieved.  Neither of them have come close to that level of job creation, despite the very much higher levels of funding involved.  Perhaps we should just note the words ‘up to’ and set our expectations accordingly.

It would be a pity though if an attempt at a creative approach to trying to fund serious investment in Welsh infrastructure were to be dismissed because of where it came from, or because the number of jobs likely to be created might have been overstated.  A more constructive approach would be to take the core idea and collectively work out how it, or something similar, actually could be implemented – particularly given that at least two of the parties agree that 50,000 more jobs is a reasonable target to aim at.  Isn’t that what we should expect of politicians if they’re serious about working together for Wales?