Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

The Department of Finance would know. It is not for us to say how these things should be communicated but it is a concern in a process which is trying to build ownership at national level. As of today, one can read what all of the documents say but cannot see what the Commission actually suggests fiscal policy will be like under the new rules. The Network of EU Independent Fiscal Institutions has also called for these to be published. The reason they have not is, I think, because they are politically sensitive things people are negotiating about. As we have seen, people added different things to the original proposals so the trajectories will now be different. You can sort of work out, if you are an economist and have enough time on your hands, what it would mean for individual countries. It is a barrier to more open debate that this has not been produced. These are just the trajectories; there is also a lot of technical work behind on what would happen if the economy goes in a different trajectory than what we thought and what it will mean. This is one of the problems, for example, with the one-twentieth rule, which was badly designed from the start. If someone had spent an afternoon with a spreadsheet, they would have understood why it did not make any sense. Instead, it appeared in text and people thought it sounded like a good idea. It is important to have rigorous testing of these things, which requires transparency and openness about the assumptions, which are not there.