IT IS easy to think that good government is all about numbers. A Chancellor of the Exchequer who is hedged in by a pledge to stick within the fiscal bounds set by her predecessor is studying numbers in great detail. The restriction of the winter fuel allowance to those on pension credit survived the debate in the Commons on Tuesday, but the true test will not be the amount that the Government ends up saving. This will come when the first pensioner is found dead in a cold house or flat. Ministers will be praying for a mild winter — not only in the hope of avoiding cold-weather payments, but out of fear of what might happen during the seven days of consecutive cold weather (at or below 0°C) that vulnerable people have to endure before the payments are triggered.

Before the General Election, we wrote about the consequences of governing badly (Leader comment, 24 May). Sadly, there are many more ways to govern badly than there are to govern well, but we focused on the failure to spend in a timely way, with the result that greater sums are demanded from successive governments, often after great and unnecessary harm has been done. We cited several examples, and many more can be found. An obvious one this week was the early release of 5500 prisoners, which started on Tuesday. A Times reporter waited outside HM Prison Brixton as a few of them came out. Of the eight mentioned in his report, seven said that they had undergone no sort of rehabilitation, and most expected to return to prison. Two faced the prospect of being homeless in three months, when local-authority provision ran out. One said: “I will end up back here. I will start drinking . . . going back to what I use to do — because of a lack of knowing where I’m staying.” All agreed that overcrowding was making prison less effective and more dangerous than before, thus justifying the Government’s emergency early-release scheme. Someone attempting the joined-up thinking that the new Government is promoting might listen to the misgivings of the Bishop of Gloucester, among many others, and ask what value there is in filling the emptied places with yet more people who will go on to reoffend. If the Chancellor is short of funds for the rehabilitation of criminals, she might draw on the money wasted on their incarceration. Again, though, the policy will have to survive the optics when someone is harmed by a former prisoner.

The Starmer Government is to be commended for seeking long-term solutions to long-term problems. This is the sort of adult politics that we have waited a long time to see. But the patience that this will require of the public is not yet in place. Sir Keir will need to find compassionate responses to short-term crises and demands if he wishes to buy time to govern well. The fact is that many of the public have forgotten what it is like to be governed well. This week saw their first lesson in the difference between sentiment and care, impulse and strategy. The tests that will come will need to be passed by the public as well as the Government.