After an absence from the Board for a little while and just before making my first post in, well ... a while, I read Gord's 'Rant on priority setting cant'. It caused me to recall many a conversation I have had with Gord (and others) on the utter uselessness of the term of 'priority'. Counterintuitive (or just plain stupid) perhaps, but it is among the most ubiquitous of PFM terms and pretty much everyone knows intuitively what they mean by it ... or do they ... ? I guess most people would think of a public spending 'priority' as something that is more important than, well, another thing that is not a 'priority'. So far so good. But in reality, the range of things that public monies are devoted to will typically include things that some people see as 'priorities' and others that people will not see as 'priorities'. Competing choices between public health interventions and tertiary services for example. Or health and education versus tourism and culture. If some of this choice is 'priority', does that mean all demand for the service should be satisfied before spending on other priorities? Or 75% of the demand? Or 50% of the demand? (if any of this can be measured in any case) Does it mean that funding of 'low priority' services be ended if insufficient cash is available for 'priorities'? In reality, cash will always be devoted to public services that tend to take a back seat (e.g. culture? sport? tourism? others?). So is 'prioritisation' simply another way of saying 'finding the right balance'? Perhaps. If so, what does this mean in practice? Well, unless one spells out what 'finding the right balance' means in practice, the term 'prioritisation' is as clear as mud. So ... for those familiar with the Orwellian background to the 'Room 101 Show', I would like to cast the first ubiquitous and utterly unhelpful PFM term to the terminal fate of Room 101 with the plea that it be replaced with whatever the speaker really intends to mean.
