PUBLIC LOANS FOR PRIVATE PURPOSES.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 525, 23 February 1876, Page 3

PUBLIC LOANS FOR PRIVATE PURPOSES.

(Pall Mall Budget.) Parliament is supposed to look rather sharply after all the money which the Chancellor of the Exchequer is empowered to raise and expend every year. Estimates precede the budget speech of the session, are more or less keenly debated, and in a subsequent session appropriations of the rates as shown by the annual finance accounts are laid upon the table of the House. But where the lending of public money is concerned no such sustained vigilance appears to be maintained. Parliament is continuously informed, and in great detail, of what is spent for national objects ; but it only knows intermittently what it lends. Reckoning from 1792 to the close of the financial year 1874, nearly £67,000,000 have been lent from the Imperial Treasury “ for the relief of trade or of individuals, for the employment of labour, the promotion of public works, or for other local objects.” Of these advances £9,406,000 have been remitted already, and £2,822,000 are estimated to be irrecoverable; together the Exchequer will fail to get back £12,228,000. Of course, the advances and the remissions have been effected with the knowledge and sanction of Parliament from time to time ; but a complete view of them only comes occasionally before the House. Indeed, it appears from a note on a return made last session that for twenty-eight years the House of Commons had seen no comprehensive statement of these loan transactions, although, as the guardian of the national purse, it seems to be its duty to care for money lent as well as money disbursed. It is estimated in this same return that “during eighty years a sum representing interest to the amount of £954,000 ” has been received by the State upon the whole of its loan transactions. Daring 1874-75 the interest on outstanding loans “ actually paid into the Exchequer ” was £466,000. The interest obtained during the whole period of these loans little exceeds the interest paid on the amounts outstanding during the last two years. Spreading the interest over eighty years, “ the percentage will be so small as practically to be little better than a nominal rate.” Surely it would be a matter of some importance, and of little trouble or cost, if a yearly statement were to be laid before Parliament of the indebtedness of each borrower, the security taken, and the terms of the loans—that is, when and bow repayable, the amount of the annual interest charged, and other particulars. The advances of the future are not likely to be less than in the past; which is another reason why Parliament should have a yearly loan budget placed before it,