At last. They’ve done it. The government has unified every snippet of data about itself on a single website. GOV.UK is bland-looking and easy to navigate. The home page tells surfers how Britain is administered.
‘The prime minister runs the government with the support of the cabinet.’
Which is true, I suppose, on a good day.
Those writing dissertations about Nick Clegg will find much to pore over. The DPM’s site reveals, in antiseptic prose, that Clegg ‘works on the full range of government policy’. The headline example is his ‘royal baby response’ which he wrote, edited, revised and finally released on 22 July.
‘News which will make the whole country smile,’ was his definitive view.
This part of the site feels like a fanzine. Colour snaps show the DPM in statesmanlike mode. Clegg reading to children. Clegg gesturing at bored workers. Clegg in front of a London bus whose direction-board reads ‘Destination Talent’. The vehicle isn’t moving, by the way, which is just as well because if it darted forwards Clegg would merge with the tarmac.
Wonks using gov.uk as an archive will find it very handy. I tracked down Cameron’s big speech on Europe easily enough. And I had no trouble tracing various EU Balance of Competences reviews and the DWP’s recent press release about Atos.
But there’s one issue which the site seems eager to dodge: deficit reduction. I typed ‘government debt’ into the search-engine and was misled to the Debt Management Office, (DMO), which is a Treasury agency that administers government cash and makes loans to local councils. It has no duty to attack borrowing.
The Treasury page isn’t much better. ‘Maintaining control over public spending’ appears to be a priority but it reveals no specific plans for making the wish come true. Streams of flim-flam glut the site. The Treasury addresses us in a chatty tone and says, ‘We work on these topics’. Right. What topics? Growth, investment, tax, enterprise, foreign affairs, financial services, and community and society. But nothing about debt. And no news about how large a slice of British GDP the state is wolfing down for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
There’s a ‘spending plans’ link which waffles on about ‘plans which will help to reduce the deficit while prioritising public service’. But that’s it. No strategy or details. You’d be forgiven for thinking the Treasury’s main responsibilities are tax evasion, education, childcare, and European funding.
I clicked on a ‘See all of our policies’ link which revealed a paragraph about ‘reducing the deficit.’ This included the telling admission that by 2009 the state was swallowing 47 per cent of GDP. And there’s a bold headline, ‘Action’, which talks grandly about implementing the National Infrastructure Plan and Lord Heseltine’s Review and other initiatives. But still no specifics.
Looking for detailed numbers, I scrolled past ‘Our Statistics’ to ‘See all of our statistics’. This took me to an archive which included the ‘Public Sector Finances Bulletin, April 2013’. But the file didn’t really want to be seen. ‘This file may not be suitable for uses of assistive technology,’ it said. I prised it open and there, at last, among the subheadings and summaries, I found this.
‘Total expenditure on services was £666.3 billion in 2011-12, an increase of 0.8 per cent on the previous year.’
There it is. In black and white. Debt is up. But you have to do a lot of Holmes-and-Watson spadework before you find the truth. And the truth is that the government is ‘cutting debt’ like a slimmer who exercises by lifting heavier pies into his mouth.
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