Mr. Robert Chote:

We could do, but the argument would be that it is for the Government to decide what quality and quantity of public services it wants to deliver, which has been a very pertinent issue over the last few years. The Office of Budgetary Responsibility, OBR, was established at a time when the Government was starting a substantial fiscal consolidation programme, although not quite as substantial as the Irish programme. It was clear that the fiscal consolidation programme was premised on spending plans which would not maintain the quality and quantity of public services but it was Government policy to achieve that level of spending. We could in principle have said that we did not believe that was politically and economically feasible for Government to deliver that share of GDP to be spent on public services spending but we did not do that. Frankly, had we chosen to do so, it would have been hard to come up with a firm analytical basis for it. What we would have been saying is that the Government has made a decision to pencil in a set of overall spending plans that most people are likely to conclude would not imply maintaining a given quantity and quality of public services but we are in a fiscal consolidation and that is what the Government has chosen to do. Historically there is no reason to believe that if that is what Government says it is going to do, and it tries to do it, it will not achieve it. It is not for us to look at value for money or the outputs obtained from the inputs.