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Alan Milburn believes a 6 per cent rise in social services spending is sufficient to fund the shortfall in care home places, but his previous promises turned out to be woefully inadequate, says Conrad Russell.

All ministers are optimists, but some are more optimistic than others. Alan Milburn, the health secretary, is an optimist of the first order. He once promised us an end to bed-blocking in discharge from hospitals, and, to this end, offered to make his promise good with spending of £300m. Now local authorities have been told that they will need to use some of the extra money from last week's Budget to cure bed-blocking, on top of the £300m.

To say the least, Milburn's mathematics are interesting. According to Liberal Democrat MP Paul Burstow's report No Room at the Inn, between April 1999 and March 2000, 21,522 people over 75 experienced delay in being able to leave hospital. These were not all trivial delays: 2,083 of them were delayed for over 28 days. Put another way, and not confining the case to older people, 32.7 per cent of all patients suffered delay in discharge after they would have been fit for it.

However, if we give Milburn the benefit of the doubt and confine the financial need to the 21,522 who were over 75, his original £300m added up to £139.39 each. Since it costs £233 a day to keep them in hospital, this would sustain them for just over half a day each. Since it costs, on average, £319 a week to keep them in a care home, this money would buy them a care home place for just over half a week each. And since we cannot suspect secretaries of state of planning to increase the death rate, Milburn can only pass himself off as evidence of the declining standard of mathematical education.

His Budget announcement suggests that he has realised the error of his ways. We have lost 50,000 long-term NHS care beds over the past five years, 28,000 of them over the past two. For the loss of beds in NHS hospitals, the blame is very widely placed on the private finance initiative, since it is necessary for the firm taking the PFI deal to generate a revenue stream. This may, of course, be unfair - the requirements of commercial confidentiality make the idea as hard to deny as it is to prove. Either way, the government has now had to find billions of pounds in extra funding to reverse the decline.

In care homes, it is necessary to postpone admissions until an existing resident dies. This used to be the system in 17th century almshouses. As a historian, finding it in operation now, I am reminded of the professor of accountancy who was once allowed, in the 1960s, to inspect my college's accounts to see whether its claim that it could not afford to pay salaries monthly was justified. He came back rubbing his hands in glee, saying he had heard that such a system of accountancy once existed, but he had never hoped to live to see it in operation.

Milburn has provided a 6 per cent increase in social services spending, thanks to the Budget. He believes that this is fully sufficient to fund the necessary shortfall in care home places and therefore proposes to fine local authorities for any failure to supply a care home place for people ready for discharge from hospital. He clearly shares the Treasury view that the proposition that any sum of money is sufficient for the purposes for which it has been granted is tautological.

The belief that government grants have recently been sufficient for the purposes for which they were allocated is not self-evident. Members of the Victoria Climbie and Lauren Wright inquiries would be surprised by the suggestion that all increases in social services spending should go to older people. It is more likely that, as local authorities fear, they will be fined for failures that are not their fault. It is high time that government grants were subject to judicial review under the Wednesbury principle - namely that the belief that the sum is adequate for its purpose is so unreasonable that no reasonable minister could have reached it.

Meanwhile, we can only ask, in relation to Milburn, John F Kennedy's famous question about Richard Nixon: "Would you buy a used car from this man?"

Conrad Russell is Liberal Democrat social security spokesperson and professor of British history, King's College, London.