Mr. Matt McGann:

The Deputy made an apposite point about the need to maintain some kind of flexibility. Most countries that have some kind of indexation maintain a kind of escape clause. We can look at what happened with wages over the past two years. As a result of compositional movements and low earners falling out of work, the average wage was increased and we got anomalous very high wage growth. That happened in the UK, which has a triple lock, and there was wage growth of 8%; despite the lock, it was just not possible to deliver on that. One must maintain some kind of flexibility or escape clause to deal with those kinds of anomalous positions.