Mr. Tom Considine:

No, if you look the first ... again at this chart, there's two halves to this. In the start of the year, the Department does out its work and prepares its advice and, by and large, the Ministers for Finance bought into that. If you take 2006, for example, the paper that we produced in February recommended a 6.6% increase in gross public expenditure. The figure that went to the Government for approval in June or July was 7.5%; it's not a million miles away from it right. But the problem arises then. The Government decides that ... they sit down the way you are sitting around the table and they decide that, but when the rubber hits the road and you come back in the autumn and health says, "Well, you know, we can't live with that. We need to do X, Y and Z." One example might be, in 2003, the Government decided it had to do something about controlling public sector numbers. It took a decision that it was going to stabilise them, I think, and cut them by 5,000 over the following three years. Now the Civil Service actually delivered on that because we were in a position to actually exert enough influence but political pressure caused numbers in health, education and elsewhere to keep on going.