Professor John McHale:

My answer to that is very similar to the one I gave Deputy Doherty. I understand the pressures public representatives are under and, more important, the importance of this spending to people's lives. There is a temptation to borrow the money to do the spending. That is what greater deficit spending means, but that puts the costs to the future. Even if we never repay the debt, we carry it in perpetuity and we carry higher interest payments in perpetuity. If we run larger deficients now, we will have to run larger surpluses in the future. In additional to that, we increase the risks that the economy faces because if some adverse international event occurs, if Brexit turns out to be worse than we had thought or something happens in the US and there are problems in the eurozone, the higher the debt level we would go into that crisis with, the more vulnerable we would be. I made the point to Deputy Doherty that this voice tends not to be too prevalent in the debate because of the pressures coming from all sorts of directions and not denigrating that, health spending, as he said, is incredibly important to people's lives. Spending will be important three, four or five years down the road when we would be carrying this interest bill, which would be crowding out the room for that spending so we would only be postponing it. I have always thought that fiscal responsibility should be believed in most strongly by people who believe in Government and the positive role it can play in people's lives. As we saw in the crisis, it is when the Government could not fund itself, when it could not access the finance to cover the deficit that inevitably opens up in a crisis, it is the Government that suffers to a large extent because spending gets caught and has negative effects on people's lives.

I hope in recent years we have succeeded - I am not sure if we have achieved this - in trying to avoid making fiscal responsibility in any way an ideological issue. It tends to get associated with those on the right but that is not where we are coming from. We are very in middle in having a range of views across the council. As I said, the more one believes in Government the more one should believe in what we are doing and it should not be allowed to become an ideological issue.

It in no way means that we do not believe in the importance of Government spending when we do the analysis and make the assessments of the kind that we have made in this report.