‘Where has all the money gone?’

It was a question posed by a friend of mine recently as we discussed the state of the economy. Yes, I know that is a depressing topic of conversation!

But the question got me thinking.

We have just been clobbered by more ways to take money from us in the recent budget and that’s on top of the tax burden already being the highest in seventy years under the previous Conservative government.

And yet nothing gets substantially better, so it’s a pertinent question: where has all the money gone? More accurately: where has all OUR money gone?

I know we’ve had Covid and global conflicts to contend with, but outside of those times, there has been little economic growth and little, if any improvement in services over the last couple of decades.

Despite more and more of our hard earned cash being swallowed up through direct and indirect taxes, things have at best stood still or in most cases got worse.

Now I am sure, like me, you don’t mind paying a bit more for a good service. It’s like buying a car; you pay less for a basic model, but if you shell out a bit extra you expect to get a few more bells and whistles.

Yet it seems the opposite is true of public services; we shell out more and more and get less and less.

Take our locals councils for instance. They are in the process of planning their budgets for next year, including how much they will put up the Council Tax. We all know they will put it up by the maximum they can; they always do.

But they are also preparing us for another round of cuts to services. My local authority, Cornwall Council, is once again warning that it has a multi-million pound shortfall despite some extra funding announced in the recent budget.

Now, I have been reporting on local government in Cornwall for more than thirty years and I can’t remember a time when the Council ever claimed to have enough money.

Back in my days on the BBC Radio Cornwall breakfast programme in the early 1990s I would regularly have the Director of Social Services sitting in front of me, along with the councillor in charge of that portfolio, explaining the latest cuts to services.

That was thirty years ago! Nothing has changed.

In fact year after year, throughout my entire BBC career, a string of councillors and officers would sit in front of me on radio and television to explain why they were cutting services whilst increasing the Council Tax.

It’s the same with the NHS. During my time on Radio Cornwall and BBC Spotlight, I interviewed scores of health bosses about their on-going financial crisis.

Every year the NHS got billions of pounds more in funding, but seemingly it was never enough to keep up with demand. Every year I would be asking the boss of Derriford Hospital or Treliske or the RD&E, why they were facing another Black Alert. Remember those?

A Black Alert was the highest level of pressure on a hospital. I think they have changed the term now, but during my time on BBC Spotlight I witnessed an alarming escalation in the number of times I had to announce that one of our local hospitals was on Black Alert.

At the same time spending on the NHS continued going up. The figures are staggering. It’s one of the largest employers in the world. Its budget next year will be pushing towards two hundred billion pounds.

But you can bet your bottom dollar it still won’t be enough.

Any extra money taken from us to pay for public services never touches the sides. It’s swallowed up by some big black hole.

So, what have I learned from my time quizzing health bosses and councillors about their budgets?

Well I have come to the conclusion that the system must be broken because no matter how much we spend on public services, it never seems to be enough.

There must be a better way of doing things, but because it’s a daily battle just to keep our creaking services going, nobody is able to step back and come up with any solutions.

I have been encouraged by the current Health Secretary’s apparent determination to link extra funding for the NHS to reforms in the way it delivers services and to try to get to the root of the problem by reducing the demand on the NHS.

But it’s like turning around the biggest oil tanker in the world. And at the risk of sounding pessimistic, I doubt much will change.

Every Minister and Prime Minister I have interviewed has vowed to improve the way services are delivered, to achieve less waste and find better ways to use our precious money.

Yet they have all failed. The evidence of their collective failures is there for all of us to see; we still have an NHS in permanent crisis and local councils struggling to deliver services.

But rather than finding a better way to deliver these services, successive Governments just tax us more to prop it all up. If they were private businesses they’d have gone bust years ago.

Most of us love and admire the NHS and most of us will have a reason to be grateful for it. We are so lucky that we are not presented with a bill every time we see a doctor, but in the end there is a price to pay.

That current price now includes higher National Insurance for businesses; Inheritance tax for farming families; more workers being dragged into a higher tax bracket; more tax on our assets; cuts to pensioners’ winter fuel payments; more tax to buy a house and more tax to live in a house. The list goes on.

Once again we’re being promised that it will be a price worth paying. But will we finally get what we’re paying for?

After thirty years’ of experience asking that question and seeing the same depressingly familiar outcomes, forgive me if I say I feel doubtful. But we must live in hope; what choice do we have?

Bye for now!