Mr. Robert Watt:

No, they do not hold what they had. It becomes an administrative political debate and discussion. For example, taking the Department of Social Protection and Employment Affairs budget, there were a lot of increases in its budget in the past when unemployment rose to 15% but the spend on unemployment benefit has since decreased dramatically and that money is no longer allocated to that Department. The leeway generated by that has been used to improve pensions and other payments. The budget allocation remains in place but the spend is different. The ultimate budget administrative challenge is how to identify lines that are not performing and reallocate that money to other parts of the Department, let alone other Departments, which, in the end, comes down to politics. It might be that there are schemes within a Department that one would want to close down or operate differently so that funding could be allocated to other areas but within that there would vested interests around that scheme and different priorities. That is the challenge the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform faces all of the time because he has endless demands every year, most of which can never be met. He would love to be able to do things differently. He can, of course, enable reallocations but there is an enormous challenge in getting people to agree to it. People do not see the opportunity cost of the funding. Let us take the Department of Education and Skills and the best way of achieving value for money being to reduce class sizes and an allocation is made. The value of the spending is not considered in the context of the opportunity cost of reducing class sizes but is considered against the objective of what the benefits delivered by the scheme are. The benefits would be greater if the funding was reallocated but that is not how it the conversation happens. The debate turns to getting more money from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to keep the scheme going, as well as getting money to reduce class sizes. This is the ultimate challenge of managing budgets and individual Departments.