Mr. Robert Chote:

Yes. We would take the overall public services expenditure envelopes over five years and assume that, if there were to be inflation shocks over that period, the Government would have to deal with them or change policy. If inflation turns out to move other than we anticipated the most obvious area it would show up would be in our estimates of debt interest costs because those that are linked to the retail prices index can be a source of near-term forecast volatility as a result of those sorts of changes. In our long-term projections we take explicit account of things such as demographics. Our working definition of an unchanged policy over the longer term, where the Government has not stated what that policy is, would assume that expenditure on most areas of public service is constant as a share of GDP but adjusted for the representative age of the population. If the population is getting older we assume we will have to spend more as a share of GDP on those things that elderly people are more likely to consume such as health care and long-term care.