AS I was standing in the Chamber of the House of Commons listening to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement a few days ago, I was struck by the surprise registered on the features of some MPs who had obviously been expecting a set of announcements quite different from those he actually made.

I don’t think that this surprise arose from differing views about complicated questions of fiscal stability – though there are obviously plenty of differing views on these questions within the House of Commons.

I think that the surprise arose from sheer perplexity about numbers.

My impression is that a lot of people who had heard that the government needed to find about £25 billion a year of savings by 2020 in order to fulfil its plans to balance the budget, thought that this was a very large number indeed and would therefore have enormously large consequences.

Of course, in one sense, anyone who thought this was right. £25 billion a year is indeed a very large amount of money.

But what some of the people who were surprised to find that it could be saved without any very enormous consequences were neglecting was that £25 billion is only about 3 per cent of what the government spends each year.

To put this another way, the plans announced by George Osborne mean that public spending will rise from about £750 billion a year to about £850 billion a year over the course of the parliament rather than rising from about £750 billion a year to about £875 billion a year over the same period.

Once you look at the numbers that way, it ceases to be such a surprise that there seemed to be an awful lot of money going round – because there is an awful lot of money going round, and the amount of money is rising; it just isn’t rising quite as fast as the rate of growth of our economy.

My sense is that a great deal of the discussion we have about the administration of our country – both nationally and locally – suffers from exactly this sort of confusion about what particular numbers imply in the real world.

As with many such problems, it is easier to spot the issue than to resolve it. I don’t have a magic recipe for ensuring that public debate focuses on numbers that are put into proper proportion. But at least I am sure we should try to do that.