I attended the Choral Society’s excellent carol concert on Saturday evening. Conductor George de Voil got the best out of the choir and encouraged audience participation in several of the most famous carols. Organist Rupert Gough provided skilful musical backing.

It was a well arranged programme with two of Betjeman’s Christmas poems to provide occasional rests from singing. I want to say a big thank you for all who worked so hard on stage and behind the scenes to make such a great evening. All Saints Church complete with decorated tree made a good background for the festive entertainment.

Heat pumps are not great sellers. Many think they do not work well. Many cannot afford the high cost of adapting their homes to take them, even allowing for the taxpayer grant available to help with the costs.Some like me who would be willing to have one in my flat are told there is not one that could be fitted.

From next month gas boiler suppliers will face a tax or fine if they fail to meet certain arbitrary targets for selling heat pumps. This is a disgrace. It will mean higher prices for gas boilers for the many who still want them. It will not necessarily  sell more heat pumps.

Nor will it save the planet. On cold windless days it will take plenty of gas burned in a fossil fuel power station to work the heat pump. Plenty of the gas is wasted in generating the electricity and more energy is lost in routing the electricity to the home. Why not burn the gas in the home so more of the energy produces heat in the right place.

Governments need to let innovation and product development in the market develop products people want to buy. Electric cars are dear and not popular enough. Developing synthetic or sustainable petrol might  prove to be a cheaper and better choice.  Then they would  not need to scrap all petrol and diesel vehicles and the plants that make them.

Putting more green hydrogen or synthetics into natural gas so we can all keep  our gas boilers might be a better answer for heating. Just stop taxing and annoying us.

There are some people in need of treatment who are waiting too long. Despite the appointment of more than 200,000 extra staff since 2019, and putting in many billions more money the stated waiting lists have  risen. There are said to be 7.7 million waiting. The strikes have not helped. The NHS does need to ensure people in pain where treatment can help should get the treatment they need in a timely way.

There is also a large amount of duff data as in so much of the public sector. Talking to a recent NHS Minister I am told the rapidly rising numbers of executives and administrators have not managed to clean up the lists and produce meaningful figures.

The first problem with the waiting list figure is it includes many people who want to see a consultant to see if there is anything seriously wrong, with people awaiting test results,  with those who are awaiting treatment after tests and diagnosis, with people who have completed treatment and may or may not need a follow up appointment.

Apparently if you are after treatment you may stay on a waiting list in case you need to come back, just as you are on a waiting list whilst awaiting test results or diagnosis.You need to say you are happy  with treatment and sign off.

There are people with more than one condition who may be on the waiting list more than once, waiting additionally for a second or third possible condition. There may even be people who have died of something else whilst registered as waiting under one or other of the categories of waiting.

It would help if all those extra  administrators got the lists into better shape and told us how many different people were waiting  for diagnosis, waiting for tests and waiting for treatment. That would help in the important task of getting different waiting times down.

I have been overwhelmed by multiple over long contributions. To catch up I have just deleted some for being overlong and one of several from the same contributor.

Treasury, Bank and OBR officials organise a Christmas event

 

Well , said the Chairman of the working group, we need a party to brighten things up after so much talk of austerity. Are there any preliminary issues?

 

Yes, said the Treasury, we need to make sure it is within the spending rules so we can claim the costs.

 

Careful, said another, can we call it something other than a party. We do not want anyone outside saying we are having an unfunded party on the taxpayer, do we?

 

That cannot happen, said another. We have been quite clear in all our statements that the only thing that can be unfunded is a tax cut. We have never allowed any of the spending rises to be categorised as  unfunded.

 

We do need to be careful about parties after all the fuss over the lockdown ones, said a cautious official who did not  fancy being dragged before some future enquiry if things went wrong.

 

So how did the pandemic gatherings  work, said a recent joiner?

 

Well the Cabinet Office usually organised them and sent out the invites. They said they were work events. Treasury signed off on that basis. Then we got the Prime Minister to pop into the odd one telling him he just needed to encourage the officials for a few minutes so if anything went wrong he would be blamed. It worked very well.

 

So how can we make sure this one  is OK?  

 

We could theme it as  review of the year and send round a few graphs and charts to make it look more serious. Hardly any of the politicians understand how we do the numbers, and when one starts to probe we change them to make them unintelligible you know.

 

What if anyone took that bit seriously? It’s a bit of hostage to fortune. Have you seen how badly wrong the Bank was on inflation? It looks as if the Bank had the Mad Hatter’s watch.Their model never seems to tell the inflation right.

Pity they didn’t have a watch like his. His didn’t pretend to tell the time. That was too difficult. It just told the date. More chance of getting that right. Silly idea to try to forecast inflation.

Still didn’t work for the Mad Hatter  though. It got the date wrong anyway. Butter got in the works 

 

That’s a bit rich said the Bank. We have always made sure our watch does not forecast money  and credit in the way thise mad monetarists want. Far too difficult. Though we call our committee the Monetary Policy Committee we just forecast inflation by looking at expectations. As we manage expectations  by saying inflation will be 2% it should always come back to that.  I thought the OBR had the Mad Hatter’s watch to tell us the borrowing. How many times now have they overdone the gloom and told us it is going to be far bigger than it is?

 

Well, said the OBR,  the whole idea is to make sure the dreadful politicians never get their tax cut. It’s all in a good cause you know to have models that terrify them. We make the models say what we want them to say. They say there is No Headroom! No headroom! So when the politicians say there is headroom, or put in low spending figures to create headroom, the OBR always has some bad news in store so there is no headroom. 

 

Oh do stop this. No-one wants to be talking about all this once the event has started. It’s just cover for the invites which could otherwise  be spotted as a frivolous party.

 

Shouldn’t we just consider this issue of spending versus tax cuts? There is a lot of fuss about it and Ministers do not seem to be very happy.

 

The thing that works best is Headroom. We keep saying there is no headroom for tax cuts, and they keep repeating it.  So just tell any politicians who wants a tax cut there is no Headroom. The OBR did a great job showing a huge fall in migration which they say means less revenue,  and in saying all the increases in public spending were not real terms rises. 

 

The best wheeze is getting the politicians  to sign up to making our forecast of the deficit in five years time as the main control said the OBR . No-one can possibly know what it is, so we can make it anything we like. More to the point in five year’s time everyone with any luck will have forgotten what we said so we are never wrong.

 

But aren’t we meant to tell the truth?

 

Yes of course, but truth is in the eye of the beholder.

To us it is true that unfunded tax cuts are a  bad idea. We are so much better at spending people’s money than they are.  Some of them have too much money and spend it just on pleasure. That is not right.

It is true that more public spending must be a good idea. After all, we receive the benefits ourselves of the extra spending, and we can say we are helping the poor and needy. We also need to have plenty of money to carry on paying the EU and all those hotels for migrants.

We can always say if we get asked that our forecasts would be  better if we spent more on them and had more people to help. It’s like time with the Mad Hatter. We can make it what we want it to be. 

 

So how will we pay if there is not enough tax revenue?

Well the Bank found  plenty of money down a money well a few years ago

That gave us £450 billion more to spend. It was great fun while it lasted.

 

Yes, but we cannot do that again now. The Bank says the money well has dried up.

 

But why doesn’t the Bank help us out? They  have a direct claim on the Treasury for anything they lose. Just automatic pay outs whenever  they want. Maybe we should ask the Bank to include the event as part of their losses, and say it is part of the costs of the  review into why they have got butter in the works of their inflation model.

 

Another bright official who was good at finding ways to do things said Why don’t we lose it as debt interest? One of the ways we are scaring the politicians into avoiding  too many tax cuts is to show them a huge debt interest figure. We doubled it by putting in all those non cash items and got away with it. So surely a small item of extra spending could be booked in there as dealing with the debt?

 

Careful said a senior. We have done so well with the debt interest adjustments , we don’t want a small thing triggering any suspicion by one of the few anoraks out there who insists on looking at it.

 

The meeting rambled on with everyone saying what they meant some of the time or meaning what they said some of the time. Was this event capital or running costs? Was it a review or a work meeting? How  did they get the drinks in  without causing any worries? 

 

They remembered that when the Bank was rumbled with too much inflation, they said it was merely transitory. That was such a good word, as some of the politicians did not know what it meant, and others wanted to repeat it because it sounded so grown up and technical. 

They talked so long they missed out on story time. Some missed the nostalgia over finding the money well and getting away with £450 bn from it before things went wrong. They had loved the £350 bn increase in annual public spending in just four years. It was even better they did not have to do anything extra  for all that money and could now work from home for much of the time. 

So they concluded that they could hold an event on the taxpayer. They would argue it was not unfunded. it would be dressed up as a review of the year just gone, accompanied by complex graphs. It would be seen as a one off transitory spend  that could come out of the contingency fund.

 If any Minister queried it, which was extremely unlikely, they would say it was in lieu of recruiting the extra forecasting staff they really needed to get the butter out of the works of their models. Best if a Minister was invited to pop in to launch it. Such a pity, they concluded, that the money well was closed. One day, perhaps in a couple of years time, they would be able to reopen it and live happily ever after.