Budgeting, as I have discussed previously, is about making decisions; decisions about what constitute your priorities. Food or Heating? Deposit on a car, or a holiday? Health or Education? As individuals, we make trade-offs between different ways of using our money (today, mine was fixing the car or tiling the bathroom. The former won.)

ourmoney

Government - national and local - must also define their priorities, and let's not forget that they are also making decisions about spending our money. But while elected officials are quick to say something is a priority, they are less keen on the obligatory action to balance the books: saying something is not a priority.

A quick unscientific example? Compare Google Search results for the following phrases:

The 3 Year Plan (a paltry 0.6 on the Stalinometer)

At last week's Cabinet meeting, one of the items under discussion was the Corporate Plan 2008-11, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. This document again quotes the "Our City" philosophy of the current city leadership:

The four Our City themes are priorities that will guide all our activity

  • Our City: Ambitious Together – going for growth that all can contribute to and benefit from.
  • Our City: Making a Difference – achieving lasting improvements in the key services we provide that are not currently up to standard.
  • Our City: Safer and Healthier – ensuring thawt citizens feel safe from crime and anti-social behaviour and can enjoy a healthy lifestyle.
  • Our City: Better Neighbourhoods – ensuring that Bristol residents experience significant change in the physical quality of their neighbourhoods and have opportunities to shape improvements at this level.

I'm busy working on another round of investigations into the Redland Green School Overspend, so I'm not going to go through this mushy document (at minimum a Type 5 on the Bristol Scale) in great detail, but I will highlight one section:

2.1 A REGIONAL CAPITAL
To deliver our vision for Bristol as an ambitious international city we need to maintain and build the opportunities for investment and economic growth, working with all sectors to achieve a dynamic economy that creates and sustains jobs for Bristol residents. We need to encourage growing business sectors, such as creative industries, environmental technologies and financial services. The creative industries sector, is one of the fastest growing in the region’s economy. It is worth £1 billion in the south west of England and employs 5% of the region’s workforce. In Bristol, the sector employs 3.7% of the workforce and generates a turnover in excess of £360 million.

Note the emphasis on creative industries, which employ a massive "3.7% 5% of the region's workforce". They need "encouragement", it says. What does that mean? If you were to ask me how to encourage any industry, I'd say you should keep regulation to a minimum, set taxation low and - as a politician - generally just keep out of the way. I wonder if that's what the council means by "encourage"?

Percentages are a great way to obfuscate reality, so I always prefer to dig out the absolute numbers. If we have a look at regional statistics clearing house Intelligence West, a few calculation on the dataset Unemployment Rate suggests that the total West of England regional workforce figure from which this percentage is derived is around 503,000 people. So the total regional "creative" workforce is around 18,600 25,100 people.

For comparison, (using the Major Employers Dataset) the four local authorities employ 38,500 people (Bristol City Council alone employs 16,500 people). The total public sector employment in the area is around 75,000 versus around 111,000 employed by the largest private employers.

Which all tells us that over 63% of people in the area(l) work in small business (the uncreative sector?) I think this tells us that we don't need to "encourage" any particular bit of the economy, other than by the measures I offered above: by minimising regulation and keeping tax low. And if we're not doing so much encouraging, perhaps we won't need to spend so much on councillors' allowances and officers' wages.