It's only a hundred million after all! (and then some)

Money is a precious commodity as we all know. If you don't have money you cannot buy things, and if you can't buy things - dare I say it - you cannot "progress" to a different point. One of the things we hear all the time from the Government is how much they are spending for us. How generous they are that they're spending on us. Now, putting aside the fact that it's our money they're spending so it's not really generosity, any normal person knows that you can only really spend what you have.

Yes, you can live in debt with your flexible friend of course (which Gordon does like to do) but at the end of the day the money will run out eventually. As such, for a government, you really have to make sure that you grab every last penny that you're allowed to grab within the framework that is available to you in the laws either you or your predecessors have created.

One of these areas is obviously not tax but penalties imposed by the Court, and money that is owing through through the court for their running and just general maintenance, i.e. legal costs owed, legal aid, administration that sort of thing. The thing is, it seems the Government is not that brilliant at resolving these debts though, and it's not really a shy little penny we're talking about either.

In London alone, the total outstanding debts owed to the Court at March this year was a staggering £111,014,484. I'm not sure what the figure is across the country unfortunately but it's probably reasonable to multiply it by five as a conservative estimate. Now I know I said it was not really a shy little penny, but I am being unfair, after all, we were told the other week by Tessa Jowell that £100 million wasn't really very much. If the Government thinks it's a pittance so perhaps I shouldn't complain?

Having said this, when we hospitals facing financial ruin, pensioners screwed, and the countries gold flogged off at Brown Bottom prices, a few hundred million quid that is owed seems an awful lot of money. One might even think that our taxes were more a subsidy for the Government's failure to deal with it's debtors than a means to achieving some sort of policy end.