Professor John McHale:

Starting with its role in the new budgetary process, the council favours retaining the two appearances its representatives currently make before the Oireachtas. It could also provide a valuable input at two other stages in the budgetary cycle. Up until now, its representatives have appeared before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform twice a year, in December and June after publication of the council’s fiscal assessment reports in which the autumn budget and spring SPU, stability programme update, are assessed. A third appearance by them following publication of the council's pre-budget statement in mid-September could also be useful. The statement sets out the macroeconomic and fiscal context for the forthcoming budget and discusses the council’s view of the appropriate fiscal stance.

Although the council favours publication of the summer economic statement at the same time as the SPU in April, the role of its pre-budget statement would be enhanced in the new system if the timing of the summer economic statement was similar to this year. Given the greater Oireachtas focus on the national economic dialogue, this is a fourth stage in the new budgetary process where the council would welcome the opportunity to provide an input. It could play an important briefing role at the dialogue by providing the macroeconomic and fiscal context for discussion at this event.

Our written submission deals with two other issues. The council would like to emphasise the importance of informative medium-term fiscal forecasts to underpin the proposed new budgetary process.

We need the data and forecasts, including those of the Department of Finance, to be published before we can carry out the assessments. That is why our two key reports thus far came out after the SPU. When the information is available, we need time to analyse it, but we bring out our analysis as quickly as we can. It comes out in early June. Following the budget, we carry out a series of statutory assessments and the report comes out in late November or early December.

The third appearance we suggested following our pre-budget statement has somewhat more of an ex anteflavour to it in terms of our recommendations, particularly on the fiscal stance. However, it could also be more constructive because it would follow on from the summer economic statement and the mid-term expenditure report. We can have most value when we are actually commenting on specific publications or documents, but we certainly would be open to having the engagement earlier. In recent years we have produced our pre-budget statement in September. It would make sense to have it earlier, potentially in August, but still following the mid-term expenditure report and the summer economic statement. Beyond this, we would be open to suggestions on how we could be of even further help to the committee. If other appearances would be useful even earlier in the process, while recognising our key function is carrying out the various statutory assessments, we would certainly be open to making them. Our goal is to be as supportive as we possibly can. We would be very happy to discuss suggestions members might have on when the committee would like to receive input from the council.