The Treasury should do its thinking out loud

Rows over leaked documents can lead to pledges that politicians wish they had never made

Let's suppose, for a fantastic moment, that copies of the the Treasury document leaked yesterday had instead been advertised as a discussion paper, put on sale at pounds 5 apiece at every WH Smith and then been debated at public meetings throughout the country.

Controversial? Certainly. You can scarcely contemplate the prospect of Britain's total GDP falling below that of Brazil without provoking deep thought about Britain's place in Europe and the global economy. Bold? You bet.

To provoke a national debate on whether pensions and unemployment benefit should be privatised so that taxes can be cut, or whether charges should be imposed for post-16 education, or the roads should be sold off as utilities, seems an unthinkably daring step. But politically suicidal? Not necessarily. Most people fear - and others hope - that at least some ministers are already discussing such ideas in private. To ventilate them in a mature democracy ought not to provoke riots.

This is no doubt an absurdly Utopian argument. But it's worth making to illustrate an important point - that nothing aggravates like a leak. Secrecy is wonderfully cosy for governments - as long as it works. As it is, the Government was yesterday engulfed in a full-scale row.

We have been here before, exactly 14 years ago. In July of 1982 a spookily similar report, from the Central Policy Review Staff, was leaked to the Economist. It surfaced at the same stage of the electoral cycle and, just like now, on the eve of what promised to be a hard-fought pre-election spending round.

As Margaret Thatcher would later say, it too had an "excessively gloomy" prognosis for Britain's long-term economic prospects. It too canvassed some potentially explosive options like wholesale private health insurance, full-cost charges for education and the long-term freezing of social security benefits.

Geoffrey Howe, then Chancellor, was forced to go much further than he would have liked in denying that he intended to dismantle the welfare state. And Mrs Thatcher, whose idea of damage limitation was to shut down the CPRS, was obliged to issue her famous pledge at that year's party conference that the NHS was safe in her hands. The accusation that the Tories had a hidden agenda dogged them up to polling day and beyond.

There were also differences between the CPRS document and yesterday's leak. The CPRS report was commissioned by Howe, although he subsequently regretted it. The current document was produced by civil servants for civil servants, and was part of a brain-storming management exercise devised by Sir Terry Burns, the Treasury's senior Permanent Secretary, on what his department's functions and size might be in the next century.

There are already signs of ministerial sucking of teeth over Sir Terry's wisdom in allowing an exercise to cover such sensitive political issues, let alone be committed to paper. And while the document may have been written by "kids" as Mr Clarke magisterially put it yesterday, it was discussed by the distinctly grown-up Treasury Management Board.

It also looks as if the "kids" spent quite a lot of time interviewing more senior members of the Treasury when compiling the document. Treasury ministers genuinely appear not to have had a hand in it - least of all the Chancellor himself. After all, Clarke is self-confessedly an enemy of what he contemptuously and habitually calls "Reaganomics."

This poses the question about how far officials should be allowed to operate a parallel government, away from the eyes of elected ministers.

Ministers, however, are not immune to the political damage. As it happens, the document also canvassed some quite left-wing ideas, such as green budgets and more autonomy for local authorities. But by giving such prominence to a Gingrichite state-shrinking agenda it touched on objectives which some Tories on the right of the Cabinet would like to realise, as John Redwood, freed from the constraints of collective Cabinet responsibility, unhelpfully pointed out yesterday.

The real problem is the endemic secrecy, dishonesty even, within much of the political class. You can talk to serving right-wing ministers who will tell you they would much rather not face the dangers of spelling out their plans for the welfare state in anything so public as an election manifesto.

Those ministers jockeying for position in the post-Major era by proposing that state spending should be reduced to well below the target 40 per cent of GDP become vague when you ask them how it will happen. Nor should Labour be too self-righteous. To imply, as Gordon Brown did yesterday, that there will be no secret reviews under Labour strains credulity.

Was it not Jim Callaghan who called in Scotland Yard in the Seventies to investigate the leak of a paper to Frank Field on the scarcely security- sensitive issue of child benefit? And if the Labour leadership seriously believes that it alone can reform the welfare state, then it must surely have more plans than have so far surfaced in its manifesto.

After the CPRS affair Howe lamented that trying to discuss sacred cows such as welfare "underlined the problems of democracy". The real lesson is quite different: politicians who want to attack the sacred cows and are afraid to do so publicly deserve to lose the argument. The events of the last 24 hours make a case for more open government, not for less.