Out of the plethora of economic detail in yesterday's Budget, emerged two of my abiding interests. The first is in the limited ability of government to understand and shape very complicated systems of human interaction. The second is in vocational education and training.

These two interests come together in Mr Osborne’s announcement that there will be 40,000 new apprenticeships. This policy reminded me very much of Gordon Brown: a bold statement is made in Parliament about a large chunk of money creating a certain outcome. Such an announcement is then followed by hordes of civil servants running around working out how to make the money do what the Chancellor said it would. Unfortunately, reality often does not co-operate, and the neat link between numbers and outcomes calculated in the Treasury proves chimerical.

This foundering of economics on the hard-to-predict world of human activity has been particularly common in the area of skills policy. The last government’s Train to Gain programme was announced amid rhetoric about creating a ‘high skills economy’. The reality was that civil servants sometimes found it hard to spend the money on anything useful and ministers had to intervene directly to force them to spend cash regardless. A lot of ‘deadweight’ training ensued, where bemused companies took money to either provide training they would have anyway, or government-specified training, the relevance of which they were sceptical about. A lot of public money was wasted in this way.

So when I heard Mr Osborne announce there would be 40,000 new apprenticeships I was both happy and a little concerned. Apprenticeships are a crucial part in reforming the education system, but the Government can’t guarantee their numbers unless it has already entered into detailed negotiations with employers (which it hasn’t), since it is the latter who provide apprenticeships (government subsidises them because they are partly educational). The fact that apprenticeships are ‘employer-led’ is why Ed Milliband was wrong to recently criticise the Government for not ‘guaranteeing’ every young person an apprenticeship. It can’t, and even in that bastion of apprenticeship provision, Germany, at any one time there is up to a 33 per cent mis-match between supply and demand.

What government can do is commit to a long-term strategy on increasing apprenticeships. Providing funding is one side of this, working intelligently with employers and educational institutions to offer excellent provision is another. As examples like Train to Gain show us, the rush to make reality match the numbers can lead to wasted money and opportunities. Let’s hope the Government’s welcome zeal for apprenticeships doesn’t lead to similar mistakes.

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