Mr. Ed Hearne:

Understood. The Vice Chairman mentioned looking across different Departments and so forth. We definitely see the scale of the role that public expenditure can play through day-to-day expenditure and the massive investment we have in capital through the national development plan. We are under no illusions as to the extent to which that has a major impact in the economy. All our focus is on improving or ensuring that can provide maximum value for money, that the public services are provided as efficiently as possible, and that the public capital programme we are engaged in is also delivered with maximum efficiency.

Going back to 2008, those years and everything we saw, in our Department we have put in an awful lot of effort in the intervening decade and a half to try to improve how decisions are made, how resources are allocated across Departments and programmes and how we benchmark and evaluate performance against those programmes. We can have more confidence now than perhaps in the past to make sure the evidence base is there underpinning all of those various Government decisions. However, I certainly take the points the Vice Chairman made.