And the message they take away about the lives once lived in them is as prettified as that communicated in old Hollywood movies. In MGM’s heyday no cockroach ever scuttled across a tenement floor and invariably boy got girl and lived happily ever after. And, like all venerable buildings, the older they get the more money they are going to consume.Acquired because each was a home as well as a testimonial to the wonders money could buy or have crafted, most of them no longer function as family houses Instead, visitors tour gloriously decorated sets. Recently, for instance, it was decided that a review of its financial performance would be dropped from the annual report sent to all members.As for all those treasure houses as they are sometimes called: what a collection of greedy white elephants they have turned out to be. They gobble up at least £33m a year – £8m more than the National Trust spends on all its hundreds of thousands of milesof countryside and its one in six miles of the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland coast. Their ignorance is not dispelled by the men running the charity who seem to keep the facts about it to themselves.

Then, beginning in the Seventies, it entered a period of enormous growth and today has 2.2 million members – more than the Labour and Conservative parties combined.The National Trust become ever bigger, richer and more powerful. But what does it stand for today? For what does it campaign?The answers are all too simple. The National Trust seems to stand for nothing more than holding on to the riches it has. It appears to be afraid to stand up for anything lest in so doing it offend someone and lose financial support or future gifts of property.Last year, for example, when I told its director general, Sir Angus Stirling, that the charity ought to be leading the way in the campaign against roads that threaten unspoilt countryside, he replied: “We must be very careful about what we say on the subject of transport because many of our members favour roads and won’t like it.” More than 40 National Trust countryside properties were under threat from road schemes at the time! Most people have had no idea of what the National Trust does. Great country house estates were in peril and the National Trust began to try to save them along with the way of life that had produced them. For the first two-thirds of its history, the National Trust was a decisive, campaigning body with a clear, if changing, purpose.

It was brought into being near the end of the 19th century by a trio of socialist do-gooders who wanted to save beautiful countryside from development in order that poor city dwellers could visit and restore their health and spirits.
During the Thirties, it entered its second phase and became a society for the preservation of the aristocracy. Although the people managing the National Trust and their passi onate defenders refuse to believe it, it is possible to be both a fan of its outstandingly beautiful properties and a critic of the way it’s run. The National Trust is 100 years old today. Let me join in the happy birthday chorus – it is one of England’s most remarkable 20th-century success stories – but let me not stop there. Why do we so often think of it only in terms of cutting costs? Why are we so timid in our willingness to apply it to a problem which causes our society the gravest concern?.

This would encourage a host of experiments in the allocation of resources. For example, is it more cost-effective to put energy into training while in prison, or on support once people come out?The market mechanism is a wonderfully powerful tool. A large part of the payment to the company would be based on their success in meeting this target.The whole effort of the prison would accordingly go into the sort of teaching stressed by Judge Tumim. The principal measure of performance would be the conversion rate.