Mr. John Palmer:

I will deal with the off-balance sheet issue. It is the old story. Eurostat is completely independent so in the first instance, the CSO decides on the treatment - the classification of these bodies. In what is known as the clarification process, every time the CSO makes a return twice a year in a process known as the Maastricht returns, Eurostat can rule one way or the other. Is there any guarantee that they will stay off-balance sheet? The answer to that question is "No" because it comes back and looks at it. In some ways, as long as it is a past event and gets reclassified on-balance sheet, it is not necessarily a huge problem because one changes the base so it is not a case of a body coming in and we must have find the money for that body within the existing fiscal parameters. One changes the base as well so one reflects what it was spending the previous year in the base as one moves forward. Thanks to the introduction of the European system of accounts, ESA, 2010, there has been a significant change. Probably the most significant feature of that is that it is not just a case of pure rules and one can tick off every rule and criterion to have something off-balance sheet. Eurostat also has the ability to take an overall view of the transaction. It can decide that although one ticks every rule, one is doing so specifically to try to avoid having something on-balance sheet and it can say that, ultimately, that this is expenditure for a public policy good by a general Government body and is, therefore, on-balance sheet. We must be careful. The idea is that one comes up with commercial transactions and then runs them by the CSO. If the CSO accepts them, it will make the return and, hopefully, Eurostat will accept that.