However, if normal UK accounting standards were applied to the public finances, then the borrowing would be more than the 40 per cent figure anyway. Gordon Brown's preferred method of financing capital public projects is through the Private Finance Initiative. More than £44bn has been utilised in this way with a pay-back over 30 years.

Effectively, the Government has a 30 year mortgage of £44bn. This long-term obligation does not appear on the Government's balance
sheet.

It is typical of Gordon Brown to use this particular method of financing, started by John Major by the way, because it hides and conceals the true position – something to which we are all accustomed.

Furthermore, there is much debate about how efficient these PFIs are. For example, the return to the providers on 12 large PFI hospitals was apparently 58 per cent, something denied by the Government. Is it not galling that we cannot finance life-prolonging drugs for cancer patients when you hear of this profligacy?

In addition, the changes in contracts have been carelessly managed. The cost of installing 300 new desks at the Home Office proved to be £300,000.

The costs of these projects is 30 per cent more than if the Government borrowed the money and did the work in the public sector. All of this because the PM cannot budget to his own rules.

Gordon Brown's often repeated favourite word of former times: "prudence" seems to have sunk into the abyss of government waste.

Passengers being priced off railways


From: Daniel Aitkenhead, Fulham Road, London.

WHEN National Express took over the East Coast Main Line with great fanfare in December, there were empty promises about "stimulating demand on the rail network".

As a Scot living in London, I used to enjoy taking the train home twice a month on a Friday evening to visit family but now find peak rail fares prohibitively more expensive than flying – and, indeed, overcrowded.

Despite booking normally two months in advance, I have never once been able to book an elusive "discount ticket" and have had to opt for cheaper airfares. Last week, I tried booking weekend return tickets for the 6pm train from London-Edinburgh on October 10 and 31 and found the cheapest option was £102 return. It was possible to fly Easyjet on both dates for £53 return – even accounting for travelling to the airport, this is still a significant saving!

I think Rail Minister Tom Harris may have got it wrong when he defended the National Express deal on Radio Four's Today programme last August: "I don't buy this idea that people are being priced off the railways; the very opposite is actually happening: more and more people are choosing to use the railways because we do have an improving system. The whole deal is very good news not just for passengers but for the taxpayer."

Richard Bowker, chief executive of National Express, was nearer the mark with his comments: "We have won a bid which is ambitious, deliverable and structured to generate shareholders value." He failed to mention this would be achieved at the expense of passengers.


Failure over food supply

From: Phyllis Capstick, Hellifield, Skipton.

REGARDING the letter from David T Craggs, "We are paying dearly for our energy failures" (Yorkshire Post, August 5), how long will it be before we are saying exactly the same thing concerning our food supply? How much more important is food than any other commodity?

Since this Government came into power, farmers have been treated with contempt.

It began with nothing more than a stock reduction scheme in 2001, when hundreds of thousands of animals were slaughtered at the behest of the EU and Tony Blair, because he believed it is cheaper to import food than to produce it ourselves. It is nothing less than criminal to behave in such a way.

We need to be as self-sufficient in our food supply as possible, in order to guard against food prices spiralling out of control, leaving large numbers of our ever-increasing population at risk from starvation.

The powers that be seem to possess little, or no, common sense, and can see no further than the end of their noses.

Pesticide bureaucracy

From: Prof John A Double, Carlinghow Hill, Upper Batley.

REGARDING the new pesticide directive, Sarah Lambert's letter (Yorkshire Post, August 6) is a farcical attempt to justify the stupid bureaucracy that I was so critical of in my previous letter (July 30).

While it is true there was some "consultation process" before the June package was drawn up, the process was flawed because the potential toxicity issues under discussion were based on laboratory data that is unlikely to be relevant to potential human exposure.

She is also way off the mark in suggesting that "banned" chemical could be replaced by "safe" ones by 2016.

The time scale to bring new agrochemicals to the market may be even longer than that to introduce new pharmaceuticals.

Sadly, as long as bureaucrats and politicians are prepared to accept and act upon scant and irrelevant data like this, commercial growers and amateur gardeners will now have little chance of producing crops for the table at an acceptable price.

Bio-fuel opportunity

From: R Darrell Hind, Merchant Way, Copmanthorpe, York.

RECENT reports in your journal indicate that there are two intractable problems taxing our leaders' brains.

The first is that of the inexorable rise in the cost of fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, coal etc and the impact which it is having on the economy.

The second is that of finding uses other than leisure for "set-aside land". I wonder if there is any possibility of using the second to ameliorate the first, namely that bio-fuel crops could be grown on set-aside land to produce further sources of re-newable energy. Among many benefits arising from these proposals could be the re-opening of the sugar processing plant in York to produce industrial alcohol – a prime ingredient of Brazil's ethanol programme, which it would appear has enabled that country to become almost totally un-reliant on imported oil.

Value of apprentices

From: Frank Pedley, Gisburn Road, Hellifield, Skipton.

DURING the labour shortages of the 1960s, the excellent apprentice system we had in this country was destroyed by the demands of the trade unions that apprentices should be paid men's wages.

One-man businesses – where the benefits of a hands-on practical education by a caring overseer showed the system at its best – could not bear the cost of an additional full-time man, and when they ceased to play their part, apprenticeships collapsed. We have paid the price ever since.

Now the TUC are at it again, demanding the full minimum wage under the new government arrangements. They must not be allowed to sabotage the scheme this time.

Let us hope that the Ministers of today are of sterner stuff than their weak-kneed predecessors and that they resist demands which are, in any event, not in the interests of the young people whom the unions claim to represent.