Outbreak of commonsense

In among all the others lies obfuscation and large gummint dross in this morning's Andrew Marr interview, Dave The Chameleon showed a small glimmer of intelligence with his idea that it was silly to have prisons in inner cities where property values are high - these should be sold off and the money could be used to build a much larger prison out of town. Transcript here.

In other words, although the Prison Service might not pay rent for such buildings, a serious cost accountant resets the clock and asks "If the Prison Service had £x millions in the bank, would it buy or rent in an expensive area or a cheap area?" And if the Prison Service chooses to use valuable buildings, that should be treated as notional income and expenditure.

Having grasped the concept of notional costs, we should extend this to ALL government buildings, including council estates and offices in Whitehall, which leads to all sorts of interesting conclusions.

Funnily enough, the gummint kicked off the idea of Asset Management Plans, whereby all local authorities were supposed to value their properties and work out notional rents, but it was never really followed through - which is why there are so still many government offices in the centre of London which are worth billions.