Be suspicious of a government that gives you a date

"By Christmas." It's the oldest deadline in the country, and one of the emptiest.

This week the Prime Minister promised to get rough sleepers off the streets by Christmas. The goal is a good one - nobody sane wants people freezing in doorways - and putting a date on it looks like the opposite of the usual political fog. A date is a promise you can be held to. A date is accountability. That's exactly why a government reaches for one, and exactly why you should count your change when it does.

Start with where the trick comes from. A deadline is a tool built for the places it works: a builder who owns the whole job, a factory line, a commander who has to take the hill before dark and pays with his own skin if he doesn't. In every one of those, the person who sets the date is the person who suffers when it slips. That's what makes the date mean something.

Now lift the same tool out of the workshop and drop it into government, and something quietly breaks. The minister who names the date doesn't lay a single brick. He owns the announcement, not the outcome. And an announcement pays out at once - the warm headline, the sense that someone is finally gripping it - while the bill for missing it falls due much later, long after the news has moved on and nobody is keeping score.

We have been sold this exact promise before. After the First World War the government pledged the returning soldiers homes fit for heroes, and not in vague terms: the plan was to build 500,000 of them within a few short years. It managed less than half. The phrase outlived the houses. A lifetime later we're still short of homes, and still being handed the date by which the shortage will end.

There's a worse effect underneath. Once a date becomes the target, effort bends toward the calendar instead of the problem. The quickest way to make the Christmas figure look right isn't to mend why people end up on the street - that's slow, and dull, and finishes long after Christmas - but to move them into a hostel for one night, or to count them on a kinder day. The deadline stops measuring the work and starts standing in for it. Hit the date, miss the point.

The honest objection deserves a hearing. They say a hard date is the one thing that ever makes a slow machine move - no deadline, no urgency, and the problem drifts forever. That holds where the date has teeth, where the person who set it loses something real if it slips. It doesn't hold where the date-setter loses nothing but a news cycle. A deadline with no name against it isn't a plan. It's a wish with a calendar.

So when a government hands you a date, ask the two questions the date is built to stop you asking. What is the actual machine that will do the work - and who pays if Christmas comes and it hasn't been done? If there's no answer to the second, the date was never meant for the rough sleeper. It was meant for you.

An opinion of the house.