No government would scrap the company which owns the railways without having an idea of how it was going to replace it, a vision of how the rail network would look in the future.

No government would announce a massive investment in the National Health Service without having an idea of how it was going to spend that money, a vision of how the health service would look in the future.

No government would dare take such risks, would it?

But the British Government appears to be dangerously close to doing so.

The Government is definitely right in tackling railways and health. They are both in a mess, due to long years of neglect. But where exactly is it taking them?

There is little wrong in practice with yesterday's announcement by Alan Milburn that a private hospital will begin doing operations that the NHS doesn't have time to perform. It matters not a jot to the long-suffering patient who owns the hospital in which their condition is relieved - providing the standards are the same in both public and private.

However, this does have long-term implications for the NHS. There are to be 20 of these routine operation hospitals, but does this mean that, in the future, the NHS is going to concentrate on acute surgery while paying the private sector to do the rest? Is this the vision? Or is it just a short-term measure to ensure Mr Milburn's targets are met in time for the next election - and what happens after that?

The suspicions were aroused that there was no long-term vision with Gordon Brown's Pre-Budget Statement last week. He announced a welcome investment in the NHS, but as it unravelled, he appeared unsure how much this was going to cost and by what mechanism it was going to be collected - anything from 3p to 13p on income tax which might be stealthily raised through National Insurance, although the Health Secretary was still pondering about hypothecated taxes. Shouldn't this nitty-gritty have been worked out in advance if this was a proper strategy?

The suspicions are aroused even more because this is a government which likes to present everything in the best possible light. Yet the spin on Mr Brown's statement last week was all about a socialist state-owned NHS leading the way in the world, and here this week is Mr Milburn being pragmatic and third way-ish by calling in the private sector to help the NHS out of a hole.

The suspicions are heightened still further by the similar uncertainty surrounding Railtrack: who's going to own it and who's going to operate it and how's it going to be paid for?

These are far too important matters for the country to be left up in the air. We must know where we are going.