If the government can create a body to scrutinise its fiscal policies, why can't it do the same across the board?
As devotees of transparency, the coalition created an Office for Budget Responsibility to assess and where necessary challenge ministers' fiscal forecasts. If only such an organisation had existed in Gordon Brown's day, it was said, he might have been rumbled earlier. Yet if that is true, the same principle surely deserves a more general application. There were claims to be heard on Wednesday that no one would lose from welfare reforms. But as our own Patrick Wintour has written, that would only be true at a point of transition to the new scheme, thanks to a special fund set up to temporarily compensate those whose benefits are being cut. Less noise was made about that. Several other potentially nasty consequences ? some unintended, most easily overlooked ? have been noted elsewhere in the paper. Take the assumptions attached to Andrew Lansley's reforms of the NHS ? as deconstructed a week ago by that Savonarola of dodgy pretensions, Ben Goldacre. Of course claims and forecasts will always be challenged, but mostly by groups ? the opposition, or critical newspapers ? which ministers can dismiss as partial. If an Office for Budget Responsibility is as therapeutic for the woebegone reputation of politics as its inventors claim, then a wider Office of Governmental Responsibility is surely warranted. An acronym sounding like Ogre might put suitable fear into ministerial malefactors. You wouldn't need to give it a name that fully revealed its purpose ? Mendacitywatch, for instance.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/19/office-governmental-responsibility
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