Professor John McHale:

I thank the Deputy for his questions.

On the timing, I must draw attention to the mandate of the council. Its function essentially is to provide a number of assessments and endorsements. Thus, it has a certain ex postfocus. We assess the budgetary forecasts. We also assess and endorse the macro-economic forecasts. We assess the Government’s fiscal stance on the basis of whether it is conducive to prudent economic and budgetary management. We also assess compliance with fiscal rules.

It should be noted that we have been quite critical in recent reports of the lack of information on medium-term plans in the stability programme update, SPU, and last year of the content of the spring statement. There has been considerable progress in the summer statement. One of the problems in the past was that the medium-term forecasts, that is, the budgetary forecasts, were developed based on the scenario of no policy change. Even though last year it was indicated that the intention was to use the available fiscal space, the medium-term forecasts put forward were based on none of that fiscal space actually being used, which led to very uninformative medium-term forecasts. There has been a substantial advance in the summer statement which includes medium-term forecasts that are based on the Government's plans in terms of the use of the fiscal space. However, I think more detail could be provided and, from the point of view of the scrutiny role of this committee, the more information that the committee has on Government plans the better it will be able to do the job of scrutiny. The committee must avoid a situation where it is being asked for suggestions that may or may not be taken into account. However, the more it knows what the Government is planning to do and the more that information is built into the forecasts, the more effective that scrutiny role can be.