The one thing government ministers of all parties love to do is announce a new initiative.

They are seen to be doing something about an issue or problem. They are putting their money (or rather, our money) where their mouth is. They make positive headlines in the media and no one can object to more funding for an urgent issue.

So they look good.

But more and more of these initiatives require some other group of people, either in the public or the voluntary sector, to make bids for the money. Funding is usually competitive.

This has a double effect which is proving increasingly unhelpful and may even start to seriously distort the provision of services across the country.

If a new fund is announced in the criminal justice area, it sometimes requires police and crime commissioners to encourage and support bids from voluntary bodies. This immediately imposes an administrative burden on us all.

There will be an application form running into many pages that will ultimately have to be filled in – and this requires a lot of work. One we are doing at the moment asks ten questions which will need 6,000 words to complete. That’s the equivalent of fifteen articles like this one.

And we may be unsuccessful. Most applications will be.

We have to take a view as to whether we can afford this sort of time for potentially no return. Sometimes those who would like to bid just don’t have people with time to research what information is required and to complete the application by the deadline.

As a result, funds are awarded to projects in different parts of the country based not on some rational assessment of local needs but on such things as whether organisations in a local area managed to find the time and people to fill in the forms.

This is hardly sensible planning.

The other distortion is this. Increasingly bids for new initiatives have to be ‘innovative’. They must break new ground.

So while we all struggle to maintain the basic services in our area and keep them running, we are being asked all the time to commit to something new for a year or two that we all know we are not going to sustain once the funding stops – without taking money from other areas of activity.

This is an irrational carousel that no one wants but no one knows how to stop.

Because ministers love it.