ABSTRACT
The 1990s have seen two promising experiments that seem to be helping to develop a more sophisticated review of the ‘balance of spending’. The Ministerial Committee on Public Expenditure (EDX) created in 1992 by Major and his first Chancellor Lamont differed in four ways from Mrs Thatcher’s ad hoc Star Chamber of non-departmental ministers. It was a permanent body, chaired-by the Chancellor, which strengthened the Treasury. It was given additional political muscle by the addition of senior ministersat various times Heseltine, Clarke, Howard, Lang, Waldergrave, some of whom had large departmental budgets (notably, Waldergrave as Minister for Agriculture and successively Clarke and Howard as Home Secretary). The presence of such senior colleagues could have caused friction, and indeed in EDX’s first year Lamont stalked out of one meeting after senior colleagues, led by Clarke (then Home Secretary) criticised his handling of the economy (Seldon 1997). When Clarke himself became Chancellor the following year he gave EDX a more dynamic role: it met more frequently, and its cycle of meetings began earlier than in previous years with discussions on the broad priorities to guide the Chief Secretary in his discussions with departments. This changed the role of the Chief Secretary: he was less independent, less of a protagonist, and more the agent of the committee’s priorities, acting, as it were, as ‘counsel to the inquiry’.* It also marked a strong movement towards greater collective involvement in the annual public expenditure survey (Wakeham 1993). Instead of a rather arbitrary allocation of spending priorities, a sub-Cabinet of senior figures imposed a set of priorities and weighed the relative merits of programmes.* It did so, of course, in pretty general terms, perhaps recognising that it is difficult to weigh the relative merits of, say, defence and transport, which must in the end be a political judgement; but, for example, in 1992 EDX (with Major’s blessing) deliberately protected capital spending as important to the economy (Seldon 1997).
