Mr. John Palmer:

I will answer the Deputy's technical question at the start. General Government expenditure and revenue are calculated or measured by reference to the European system of accounts 2010. It is an annual system. The Deputy is perfectly correct that it examines revenue and expenditure in a given year. That is how we calculate the headline deficit. That is the starting point for the structural balance and so forth.

The Deputy is right that if money had been raised in earlier years and put aside and spent, it counts as general Government expenditure. When it came in, it was counted as revenue for the year it came in. That is a fact of life. That is the way the accounting system works. All our targets are set on this annual basis. Up to this year, it was a straight deficit. Now we are into the preventive arm and we are talking about the structural balance and complying with the expenditure benchmark. We have to consider what we spend in a given year and the revenue in a given year and revenue from earlier years does not count. There is no offset for it because it was recognised when it arrived in the first place.