Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

That is a very reasonable way of showing it. The Government managed to disagree with us on both things. It comes back to this trade-off framework we have always used for thinking about things. At the moment, particularly coming to the end of the programme and the 3% target that has been the anchor for a long time, we are very concerned about what happens in 2015. Having achieved that, things should then be more relaxed in terms of the environment and credibility and this should create the space that would allow less pressure on expenditure in the outer years. There is a question of how much consolidation is being done.

The second question is that it depends how that consolidation is achieved. If it is done badly, it will obviously be much more damaging to the economy than if it is done well. There needs to be very careful discussion about how it will achieved - whether it will be on expenditure or taxes - and within that, how it will be achieved. For example, squeezing something like investment seems like a bad idea for the reasons set out by the Deputy but it also means that there is a very high cost to carrying pieces of public expenditure that are inefficient, of which there are surely going to be some. There are many important choices to be made to make it less bleak than the Deputy suggests.