The Territorial Departments and the Detachment of the Treasury

There are good reasons for not neglecting the non-English parts of the United Kingdom in any discussion of British central government, but in the Treasury there is a more general analytical point that they illuminate. This we may call the concept of ‘permissible detachment’ — if expenditure is small and geographically distant the Treasury may be prepared to ‘let go’ to a greater extent than if the magnitudes were greater. Traditionally, the Treasury has been wary of automatic funding mechanisms that set up an institutional barrier to its scrutiny of departments. The biggest concession on this front — the aggregated defence budget which was basically a single line in public expenditure plans, and for much of the 1980s was reinforced by a Nato commitment to increase defence expenditure by 3 per cent a year in real terms — has been clawed back in recent years. But at a lower level of expenditure, the Treasury has an interest in shortening its lines of control. Confessions of factual ignorance about a service are seldom a motive for Treasury withdrawal, but a desire to reduce workloads can be. The process of local authority grant consolidation in the 1950s and 1960s was a policy of the Treasury rather than the spending departments.