Financial Control in Administration
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1931.tb02901.x |
| Author | Charles Harris |
| Date | 01 July 1931 |
| Published date | 01 July 1931 |
Financial Control in Administration
By
Sir
CHARLES
HARRIS,
G.B.E., K.C.B.
[Paper to
be
discitssed at the
Summer
Conference
of
the Institute
of
Pzcblic Administration,
July,
19311
INANCIAL
control is a wide subject-almost as wide as govern-
F
ment itself; for,
as
Mr.
Lloyd George once said,
‘‘
Finance
is
Government
”
:
that is, money is the common denominator to which,
willy-nilly, ideals and efficiencies must be reduced before they can
secure priority of adoption.
To
argue this is unnecessary here, as we
all know that money is the directive of man-power, and financial
limitations reflect the fact that no nation can divert an unlimited pro-
portion of such power from the production
of
wealth to the non-pro-
ductive or destructive activities with which governments are
so
largely
concerned; and never more
so
than when, as now, high among the
activities of government must rank the inactivity politely spoken of
as maldistribution
of
leisure. But
our
theme,
“
Financial Control
in
administration,”
narrows the subject
by
excluding all the parlia-
mentary
part
of such control: the debating of Estimates, the deter-
mination
of
policy and the voting of funds; for though, as citizens,
we may feel that no part
of
our system more urgently needs rationali-
sation,
it
would not be in order for
us,
as public officials,
to
cnticise
the ways
of
Ministers and Parliaments.
If
our
budgets, our trade
returns, our credit and the course of our national debt for years past
combine to show that our once justly admired system of financial
control, taken as a whole, is now simply ineffectual, it is not for
us
here to allot the blame between the political and the administrative
parts of the machinery. But
one
fact stands out: with
us
more than
any other constitutionally governed nation, parliamentary
control
of expenditure has sunk to a farce.
No
less an authority than our
President,
an
ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer with
forty
years
of
parliamentary life to his credit, recently told
a
committee that the real
work
of
financial control
is,
and
must
be, done not
by
the House of
Commons and its committees, but by the spending departments and
the Treasury. But this puts the permanent Head of the Treasury
in
a
false position; for though among clerks he is an Authority, among
Authorities he is
a
clerk, without the power the guard
of
an express
312
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