You can make the public sector look a lot smaller if you just define its activities as 'private'. For example, when the UK Chancellor Gordon Brown got private consortia to put up the cash to build new state hospitals, he did just that. And he fought a long battle with the Office of National Statistics (headed by a man with the unfortunate name of Cook, as in books) to make them accept this sleight-of-hand.

Now the ONS is getting its own back. For a few years now, the government has encouraged 'city academies'. These take state-supported students, but are sponsored and run independently by philanthropic investors. When one, in Middlesborough, got into financial difficulties with £1.5m debts, the government bailed it out.

Whereupon the ONS said that if the government was going to underwrite the debts of city academies, they could no longer be considered independent and had to be re-classified as - well, quangos, basically, like the ONS itself. So out goes the city academies' independence, in come all the rules and regulations that government the finance and operation of public bodies.

Of course, that would kill a pet policy stone dead, so the government will find some way round it. But isn't it bizarre that the government statistics nerds apparently have the power to turn private into public at the stroke of a definition?