It was only yesterday that we contrasted David Cameron’s newfound enthusiasm for Tesco with his comments - a year ago - criticising supermarkets’ bullying of suppliers.

Weirdly, there is news on this front. (From today’s PA)

Supermarkets should be forced to pay for a watchdog to resolve disputes with their suppliers, a regulator told ministers today. The Competition Commission urged the Government to install an ombudsman after failing to secure agreement from a majority of grocery retail giants on a voluntary scheme.

It made the call as it published a tougher code of conduct for the sector following a lengthy investigation which uncovered problems the Commission warned could hurt consumers.

Farmers’ leaders welcomed the move which they said would help end “underhand practices” which forced them to cut their prices but retail chiefs warned it could spell the end of cheap food for shoppers.

The main aim of the ombudsman, who would be appointed by the Office of Fair Trading, would be to adjudicate on disputes under the new code “to promote the interests of consumers”, the Commission said.

So does David Cameron have any view on this? Over to you, Conservative press office.

UPDATE: 6.40pm. No comment as yet.

The man who runs the Local Government Pension Scheme has warned that public sector pensions need radical reform to meet critics who believe there is a growing “pensions apartheid”.

Bob Holloway, who manages the LGPS, is quoted in Public Servant magazine saying radical options must be considered. These could include:

1] increased employee contributions

2] raised retirement ages

3] public service cuts

4] council tax rises

This is radical stuff to come from a senior DCLG official (*although Holloway disputes parts of the article). His other suggestions - speaking at a conference of Whitehall types - included the idea of higher and lower membership bands. This could mean those earning £75,000-plus could have to pay higher contributions.

“The LGPS is under threat, something has to happen - things may even happen before a general election,” he said. “There will need to be something more major than a sticking plaster. Unfortunately, people are refusing to die.”

This is surely going to be one of the major battlegrounds before or after the general election. Philip Hammond has warned that it’s unsustainable for 90 per cent of public sector workers to have final salary schemes while only 5 per cent of private sector workers do. Watch this space.

UPDATE

Here is the government’s response:
“No changes have been proposed. There is an informal consultation going on with scheme administrators to gauge views ahead of the next year’s routine three yearly valuation. The Government will continue to make sure the LGPS remains fair, solvent, protected against risk, and affordable to the taxpayer.”

FURTHER UPDATE

* Holloway is disputing that he said points 3 and 4. And someone else who was at the speech confirms this, telling me that Holloway’s main recommendation was the increase in employee contributions.

Expect several front page headlines on Tuesday morning about HMRC’s plunging tax receipts in 08/09 - laid bare thanks to an NAO report. Astute readers of this column will already know about the £20bn-plus fall in tax take - you read it here - because it was flagged up on Budget day in the red book small print. You’ll notice that the coming year is set to be even worse, according to the Treasury’s own predictions.

The real nasty today was another £10bn-plus of unpleasant news, including £3bn of uncollected tax and £7bn set aside for legal claims by taxpayers. The bulk of the latter - a staggering £4.8bn - stems from a single landmark case concluded early last year over VAT repayments. HMRC admitted today that they have already paid £1.5bn as a result of this “Fleming” test case. That’s an awful lot of helicopters or MRI machines.

Attempts to clean up the financial system have become more urgent given reports of the banking world returning to normal.

There are suggestions that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley could agree to pay out $34bn of bonuses between them later this year. I caught up with a friend at the weekend who works for a bank in the US: “Everyone is expecting a bumper bonus season, it’s going to be hugely controversial when this comes out,” he told me.

Of course lending has not yet returned to normal. But banks have been able to profit from recovery surges in some markets, for example stock markets outside Europe and the US. Soon it will be champagne time on some trading desks.

Today’s white paper on banking - issued by the Treasury - doesn’t seem to be greatly radical despite its broadly sensible tone.

1] It urges more sensible remuneration practices but fails to specify how pay and perks should be curtailed in any detail. The paper says “the FSA now has powers to penalise banks if their pay policies create unnecessary risk“. Every year the City watchdog will have to report on how banks are complying with a remuneration code of practice.

It will also “integrate oversight of remuneration policies into overall assessments of risk.” The Treasury is briefing that this means that banks with over-generous pay packages will have to hold higher levels of capital.

But how will they define “unnecessarily risky” pay packages? Herein likes the difficulty. I’m told the Treasury discussed the idea of a “maximum wage” and quickly realised it was unworkable. Let’s wait to see how this works in practice.

2] Alistair Darling (here is his speech today) will give the FSA a new statutory responsibility for financial stability but will otherwise leave the tripartite regime (Bank of England, FSA, Treasury) intact.

3] There will be a new “Council for Financial Stability” which will supervise meetings, three or four times a year, between representatives of the three bodies (who already meet regularly). These gatherings will be minuted and those minutes will be made public.

4] The FSA is strengthening rules to make sure banks hold enough capital as a buffer against losses.

Andrew Tyrie, a Tory MP on the Treasury select committee, said the white paper was “Rearranging the three key deckchairs on the Titanic”. There were questions as to why Mervyn King (governor of the Bank) only saw the report last week.

It was Lord Myners who hit the nail on the head when he told the committee this afternoon: “No amount of supervision will guarantee that you will make up for poor governance, poor management and a poor culture (at banks)”.

It is a difficult circle to square:

Ministers want banks to be responsible and risk-averse. They also want them to provide more loans for families and businesses.

The two are contradictory.

We had another insight into this puzzle this morning when the FSA, Lord Myners and John Healey (housing minister) were up in front of the Treasury Select Committee.

You may remember that Gordon Brown wants to ban 100 per cent mortgages. (”A new era of responsible lending“). The prime minister has asked the FSA to examine the issue. The watchdog is putting out a paper in the autumn examining whether mortgage restrictions are a good idea.

But the FSA executives who appeared this morning at the committee seemed far from enthusiastic about setting restrictions on loan-to-value or loan-to-income ratios.

Jon Pain, managing director of retail markets for the City watchdog, said that imposing “caps or collars” on mortgage lending based on income or deposit ratios could be a crude tool for measuring affordability.

Instead, lenders had more sophisticated ways to work out whether a household could repay a home loan, Mr Pain said. Assessing a loan on the basis of income versus mortgage was a “superficial” ratio, he said.

Mr Pain said that the level of a household’s disposal income - after paying mortgage payments - was a more appropriate figure than loan to value or loan to income ratios. (An argument used by many lenders in recent years to justify their more “liberal” lending practices).

Meanwhile another FSA executive, Leslie Titcomb, argued there were concerns about the potential impact on first time buyers.

“We are also concerned that having a fairly blunt tool like a cap on loan to values could have an effect of denying first time buyers access to the market, which would be unfortunate,” she told the committee.

Maybe I’m over-interpreting here but that seems pretty clear…..no ban on 100 per cent mortgages or banks lending six times your salary.

Sally Keeble, a Labour member of the Treasury select committee, said the comments proved that there was a “clash” between the two arguments.

“I’m fairly certain there is a clash about what the government wants to do,” she told the FT. “On the one hand, they want to see prudent lending, which argues for tight controls on loan to value ratios, on the other, they want people to be able to get loans.”

There’s a section at the back of the Building Britain’s Future document where Labour spells out key “deliverables” for the next decade.

Some of these are indeed likely. Others less so. Alex and I have picked out some of the more controversial ones.

2013: Budget deficit halved since 2009/10.

8/10: Yes, this is the plan - the annual deficit should be back down in four years’ time. Although the national debt will keep on rising. The distinction between the two has been the subject of a ferocious row between Ed Balls and Fraser Nelson.

2014: £16bn of asset sales achieved

2/10: I revealed on Monday that this target is based entirely on a buoyant property market. Of the total, £11bn has to come from local authorities. But the LGA says council property sales have slumped from £4bn a year to £1bn a year. (Incidentally, if councils keep the receipts, how exactly does this plug the public finances - as No. 10 seem to suggest?)

2016: 240,000 new homes provided each year, improving affordability.

4/10 Given that only about 100,000 homes will be built this year, the forecast implies a dramatic recovery in the housing market. And the mortgage market. Clearly it is possible but this is crystal ball gazing. For now affordability will only be improved by house prices falling further. You’ll notice that the BBF document doesn’t refer to the ludicrous 3m homes by 2020 target.

2017: First Crossrail trains are expected to start running.

6/10 This afternoon I spoke to Stephen Glaister, the transport expert. He has serious concerns over whether the government will be able to afford the £5bn needed to make Crossrail work. He pointed to the line in the Budget saying government investment will drop in the next five years from 3.1 per cent of GDP to 1.3 per cent. “That is a terrifying figure,” he observers.

2017: 400,000 new green jobs

2/10 When it comes to green jobs Gordon Brown likes to pluck figures from thin air. I pointed out in January that he has so far predicted 100,000 new green jobs, 140,000 and 1million. I suppose 400,000 is neither less likely nor more likely than these other random numbers.

2020: Child poverty eradicated in the UK

3/10 Unlikely. The government was supposed to halve the figure by 2010 and has signally failed to do so. That doesn’t bode well for the bigger target.

2020: 90 per cent of children leave primary school having mastered the basics in English and Maths

?/10 I sincerely hope this one will happen. But it shows a desperate poverty of aspiration. A tenth of children aged 11 still illiterate and unable to add up - celebration time!

2020: 15 per cent of all our energy coming from renewable sources

4/10 Not exactly on track. Britain is still behind almost every other EU country in producing renewable energy. Here is a reminder of Shriti Vadera’s attempts to water down the target by asking if the UK could include, um, overseas projects funded with British cash.

2010: Up to 10 new ecotowns developed

1/10 Even the DCLG’s own internal report admits that only some of the remaining ecotown proposals will survive without public subsidy. For now, at least, the project appears doomed.

You would have thought that the prime minister would now have his public sector spending numbers at his fingertips - given that David Cameron has made the issue his focal point for three sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions in succession.

Apparently not. “Capital spending…will fall after 2011″ he said. Then, later: “Capital spending will rise to 2011 and then fall.”

This is less wrong than his previous PMQ claim that capital spending would keep rising until the Olympics (2012).

But it’s still wrong.

There was a clarification towards the end of the half-hour session when Brown said that in fact the figure would fall in 2010. His admission came after prompting by a Tory MP who reminded him that the Treasury’s own capital spending figures show £44bn this year and £36bn next year.

Some pundits are wondering whether Cameron should start following a different strategy and stop using up all his questions on the same theme. They ask whether the impact is blunted by repetition. I’m not sure. After all, Brown’s reputation was built on his solid grasp of numbers.

UPDATE

I forgot to mention Brown’s preposterous claim that the Tories were expecting unemployment to rise in the coming years - as if he was not.

Surely the Treasury’s own economic forecasts are based on unemployment rising substantially from today’s levels? Given that this is the consensus of almost all independent forecasters.

The charge against Gordon Brown is that his promise of future investment - instead of cuts - is cloud cuckoo land given the grim public finances. You may think this unfair.

But here is the verdict of the governor of the Bank of England today when asked about the national deficit:

Mervyn King:

“The speed of which the fiscal stimulus should be withdrawn has to depend on the state of the economy. …The scale of the deficit is truly extraordinary. 12.5 percent of GDP is not something that anybody would have anticipated even a year or two ago. And this reflects the scale of the global downturn.

But it also reflects the fact that we came into this crisis with fiscal policy itself on a path that wasn’t itself sustainable and a correction was needed.

There will certainly need to be a plan for the lifetime of the next parliament, contingent on the state of the economy, to show how those deficits will be brought down if the economy recovers to reach levels of deficits below those which were shown in the budget figures.”