Woah. That’s messed up. A neutral public service should be able to cost proposals coming out of both sides.

It’s funny you should use the term ‘threat’ since, in the UK, it is the Opposition that want to be costed to validate their proposals and the Government that refuse to allow that.

The threat of independent cursory costings could induce the opposition to put their serious good proposals to serious costings.

Sure, and I think that the office has actually forced the Government to do that with its Budgets, too. A useful antidote to last-minute decisions!

The opposition could always provide their policies earlier for a more thorough process if they could trust in the office to keep it confidential.

Yes, I agree that it could be done, but not to a standard equivalent to the Government’s costings. A lot of the time is in running the Government’s tax and expenditure models, which would be hard to cut out without compromising the process. You could just use rules of thumb but it wouldn’t put the Opposition costings on the same footing as the Government’s. I guess it would be a bit of a lottery as to who the rules of thumb would favour but, at the very least, the final report would likely say that they’re not comparable.

Yes, I agree that it could be done, but not to a standard equivalent to the Government’s costings. A lot of the time is in running the Government’s tax and expenditure models, which would be hard to cut out without compromising the process. You could just use rules of thumb but it wouldn’t put the Opposition costings on the same footing as the Government’s. I guess it would be a bit of a lottery as to who the rules of thumb would favour but, at the very least, the final report would likely say that they’re not comparable.