Mr. John Kinnane:

The previous approach was where we set out a precommitted expenditure amount. For example, in the budget year immediately following the summer economic statement, SES, we would have an amount for the carryover of existing budget measures, existing commitments from public service pay deals, and then an amount for demographics. Typically, that amounted to approximately €1 billion each year. Then, as we moved into years two, three and four of the forecast horizon, that dropped because we did not have carryover from budget measures to factor in, so we were only showing an amount for demographics. The precommitments would generally drop from approximately €1 billion to half a billion euro across the forecast horizon. What we had found was, just looking at budgets in the run up to 2021, the ELS costs exceeded what we would have set out as precommitted expenditure in the SES or in the mid-year expenditure reports. We looked at previous budgets. In general, it was running at approximately 2.5% to 3% of the expenditure base for ELS costs each year.