Lord Agnew, a former Treasury Minister, explains how poor numeracy costs the nation £25billion
Numerical rigour in the Treasury should not be a nice-to-have or an add-on to civil servants' core job roles. It should be central to it.
I know from my time as a Treasury Minister that every policy recommendation, every spending decision, and every line of a Budget or Spending Review rested on the assumption that the people producing it could actually handle numbers.
This must be the basic operational requirement of one of the most consequential departments in Whitehall.
That is why so many were shocked and even angered by the revelation that the Treasury has quietly removed its numerical reasoning test.
Whilst this is a story about misguided diversity policy, it is an issue that goes much deeper than that.
It should be read as a symptom of something far deeper and far more damaging: Britain's slow, institutional retreat from numeracy as a core national skill.
This is precisely what the Numeracy for Life Committee has been documenting with increasing alarm.
The statistics bear this out. Poor numeracy costs this country an estimated £25billion a year.
Individuals with low numeracy are more likely to be unemployed, more likely to be in debt, and less able to make the kinds of financial decisions that determine the quality of their lives.
And yet the institutional response – as the Treasury's decision now makes clear – has been to lower the bar rather than raise ambition.
The logic appears to be that if numerical tests produce inconvenient results, the answer is to remove the tests. This is the pretence of supporting diversity, purchased at the cost of genuine competence.
There is a particular irony – and a particular danger – in the Treasury, of all departments, treating numerical reasoning as dispensable.
This is the institution that writes the tax rules every business and individual in Britain must navigate, that sets the fiscal frameworks our public services depend upon, that signs off the regulations governing our financial lives from cradle to grave.
It should be the gold standard, the one place in Whitehall where the importance of getting the numbers right is beyond question.
Instead, the old adage applies: the fish rots from the head.
If the Treasury signals that numeracy is negotiable, that signal travels through the civil service, through our institutions, through the quiet assumptions we make about what we expect of ourselves as a country.
Millions of Britons are paying what I would call an Innumeracy Tax every single day in higher debt costs, poor financial decisions, and unrealised wage increases.
This is a policy failure, and the Treasury's retreat from its own standards is the most eloquent possible symbol of how seriously we have failed to solve this issue.
The Numeracy for Life Committee is not prepared to let this drift continue.
We are listening to the evidence of experts from across education, business, finance, and the wider economy, and we will be bringing forward serious, practical recommendations that match the scale of the challenge at the end of the year.
A country where millions cannot confidently handle numbers is a country leaving enormous economic potential permanently on the table.
That is not fair to the millions of Britons with the talent to go far, but without the support to do so.
The Treasury should be leading that charge, not quietly abandoning it.
Lord Agnew is a board member of All Perspectives Ltd, the parent company of GB News.