The treasury have kindly provided me with an update of the breakdown of the special reserve allocations, which I’ve incorporated into Table 2 of the briefing. There are three things that strike me as notable:

• The cost of Iraq is increasing, albeit slightly. It’s not entirely clear why - the large extra capital expenditure I think is for new equipment to replace the old that had expired, but not sure about why the normal expenditure increased.
• The total amount allocated to departments last year is GREATER than the total amount allocated to the Special Reserve. What does this mean? Presumably that money is being taken out of general reserves in addition, though it’s not clear (when I asked the treasury this they didn’t seem to know or care much themselves). But this means the amount allocatd to the Special Reserve may become an UNDERestimate of the total spent in Iraq
• The amount allocated to the GCPP still remains pretty high (although even taking this away from last years reserve allocations the above point still holds), and certainly bigger than the £200million that Brown allocated in the budget for next year. But god knows what this means, as no-one seems to know much about it, and I haven’t really looked at it since it’s not Iraq. But it seems a bit fishy to me that if this is being used for general peacekeeping activities it’s coming out of the reserves rather than department budgets.

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