Dr. Miche?l Collins:

I am a member of the advisory group for the Parliamentary Budget Office. The issue has been discussed by that office because of a request by parliamentarians to have more information that they could use and the costs of various policies and policy reforms. Two, or maybe three, points arise in this regard. One concerns the provision of data. Where there are logjams, which clearly feature in the case of tax expenditure and so on, the matter needs to be sorted. There is probably an issue over transparency of costings when we get them. Inevitably, assumptions are made as to how high or low something is or what it is going to cost, so maybe we are talking about bands of costs rather than an actual number. The third issue is probably personnel. It is time-consuming to do these things. If we are going to weave them into our policy discussion, which we should and which I can see this committee wants to do when it is engaging on particular issues, we will need to provide more resources to the Parliamentary Budget Office or relevant individuals in the Department of Finance, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform or elsewhere so as to be able to produce the outputs. Some of the time, we are not.