Professor John McHale:

Our work on this has been portrayed as advocating automatic indexation, which was never our intention. This exercise is about identifying how much extra spending would be required to provide the current level of services and benefits given those demographic and price pressures. Of course, it is a policy choice about whether you try to maintain those services or maintain the real value of benefits. We are trying to give the information to decision makers, including the committee. When we see the estimates for fiscal space, the next question should be: how much of that is required to do what we are doing as an input into the decision-making process? That is what the standstill scenario is all about. It was never meant to be a proposal for automatic indexation, which, unfortunately, is the way it was taken up.