Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

On the impact of the budgetary measures - of course, there is the vexed issue of indexation on how to capture it - our colleagues would have said that relative to a position whereby if welfare bands had been fully indexed, people were not as well off as what was the case before the budgetary measures were introduced. Our overall assessment of the budget was that, on the tax side in particular, we would have welcomed the fact there were not any significant changes made and, in fact, we would probably have welcomed a type of stealth increases because the tax bands were not indexed. We felt the economy overall is not doing very well and, therefore, if anything, we needed the budget to be somewhat contractionary in terms of its impact. However, on the other hand, because we had the prospect of a no-deal Brexit looming, we welcomed that it was a wise and prudent strategy to divert funds that could be used to tackle the various different sectors which may be impacted if we have a no-deal scenario. In fairness, it was a very difficult budget to frame but, on balance, we probably would have felt it was a prudent budget but the one dissenting issue would probably have been that we would have advocated welfare bands be indexed to minimise the impact.