Do you ever wonder what politicians are talking about when they wheel out the economic statistics?

Take for instance the GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, that they and the political media love to talk about.

When they invited us last month to rejoice because it was rising and therefore the country is doing well, was that a cue for you to switch off?

If so you are far from alone, but please don’t do so now. I promise you I’ll make it simple.

The GDP, for readers without economic degrees, is the sum of everything in the country that the economists think can be valued in pounds and pence.

The bigger it is, the richer the country.

But rich in what?

A safe can be crammed full of paintings and other valuable works of art and therefore have a “gross domestic product” of millions of pounds.

But since no-one can see them, they might as well not exist.

If those same paintings are hanging in a gallery where anyone can see them and admire them or experience them in some way, then they have a value, but not one that can be measured in pounds and pence.

The GDP, rising or not, is no way to measure the state of the nation.

If only the politicians would look up from their financial spreadsheets and economic measures and see what the rest of us see every day.

I’m talking about:

l the number of people without homes or living in accommodation not fit for animals

l the number of people having to choose between paying for food or paying the heating bill

l the number of teenagers leaving school without a basic education

l the number of patients lying on stretchers in hospital corridors because there aren’t enough beds in the wards

l the number of elderly people without proper care. I could go on and on.

I don’t mean the kind of counting that Jeremy Hunt demonstrated recently when he loudly proclaimed that the NHS has never recruited as many nurses as it has in the last year or so.

Next time you are in York Hospital count just how many nurses there are or rather are not. Do we really have more nurses on the wards? I doubt it.

What the Health Secretary didn’t do was tell us how many nurses have left the NHS in the last year or tell us the answer to the number of new nurses minus the number of nurses leaving the NHS.

I’m talking about counting the problems, not choosing a statistic to make it look as if the Government is doing something.

Each of the numbers I listed above is currently too high.

Each is a cause of shame for the Government because each one shows that something is not right in our so-rich country.

How can we trumpet about how this country has one of the biggest economies in the world if we don’t use that money to ensure that those who actually live in it have a decent standard of living?

Instead politicians should base their actions on a series of measures of how the people of the country live - such as the list I gave above.

They could, for instance, give us monthly updates on the number of homes that are substandard accommodation and look at ways of reducing that number to zero.

If they had done that, Grenfell Towers may yet be standing unharmed.

But a council intent on reducing costs cut corners and we all know what happened last August.

In Northamptonshire, a county council that has followed the Government’s financial orders to the letter is now warning that it is staring bankruptcy in the face and has problems just fulfilling its basic job - caring for those who cannot care for themselves.

Again, it put financial management above people. It is unlikely to be the last council in such a state.

Politicians are very keen to talk about how to get “value for money” when they really mean reduced or axed services.

If the Government concentrates on people, then it really will get “value for money” but it has to think people first and money second.