Mr. John McCarthy:

The legal basis for the expenditure benchmark is Article 126 of the treaty. That is the primary legislation. The secondary legislation is Regulation No. 1466. This is the preventive arm of the Stability and Growth Pact, which was reformed in 2011. Essentially, the anchor of the preventive arm is the so-called balanced budget or medium-term budgetary objective. In the past, this was assessed on the basis of changes in the structural balance and how fast countries were approaching their medium-term budgetary objective. The reforms to the Stability and Growth Pact in 2011 introduced the concept of the expenditure benchmark. The legal basis for that is Article 126.

The overall objective of the benchmark is to set spending in line with the potential growth rate of the economy. It is averaged over a ten-year period. If a country is not at its medium-term budgetary objective, there is a so-called convergence margin. The country must have expenditure below the benchmark and must be converging sufficiently rapidly to the medium-term budgetary objective.

In respect of what it actually means in monetary terms, I am simply not in a position to answer today, I am afraid.