Paul Johnson

I mean, some of these things are really small.

And the expensive things like not increasing fuel duty is very poorly targeted.

Well, targeting has its own problems, of course.

I mean, we do lots of targeting in the sense that we have about £100 billion of working age welfare, most of which is targeted at people who are either on low incomes or who have health problems.

That's a very big...

targeted amount of spending.

And that has its issues in terms of work incentives and other behavioural effects.

But when you're looking at energy use, one of the problems government has or has had up till now, and they've been explicit, they still have this problem,

is we don't know the link between people spending on energy and their income.

So we know people's incomes through the sort of tax and welfare system.

And we know how much people are spending on energy through their energy bills.

But the two are not connected.

And one of the reasons why we spent such a vast amount last time round, because government frankly could think of no way

of making this uh more targeted than it was now there are some indications that maybe five years on they've just about worked out how to do it but also um very explicitly the treasury was saying earlier in the year that they were not yet able to make that connection now one of the things i have to say without sort of saying i told you so one of the things i did say back in 2022 was okay maybe there's nothing better we can do this time but it's worth spending like a billion pounds

trying to work out how to do this better so that next time it happens, we can save tens of billions.

I don't really know the answer to that.

I mean, there's a huge bureaucracy.

You're really getting me into nerd mode here.

There's a huge bureaucracy around using data effectively within government and outside it.

as head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, people used to ask me quite often, what's the hardest thing?