Mr. William Beausang:

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform strongly endorses the importance of transparency across the board, in the Department's work programme and in matters such as lobbying regulation, freedom of information, and open data. In the area of public expenditure, we fully understand, including from our own work, the importance of a presentation of the Government's fiscal accounts that is as clear, transparent and simple as possible. If that information is not available, it represents a significant obstacle to understanding and accountability.

On the pecking order, it is fair to say that arising from the OECD's work, which is featured in its report on improving parliamentary scrutiny of the budget, we have prioritised many of the measures arising from that. The publication of a performance report, expected later this month, will allow sectoral committees to examine the performance of Departments relative to the allocations made to them.

That is an important innovation. On our side, the mid-year expenditure report is a very important stocktaking in the middle of the year in terms of where spending has got to and our projections as to what spending will look like for the remainder of the year. It is also very important in setting up the position for the budget for the next year. We have done a lot of work. The work on implementing the IMF fiscal transparency report came to a point where we understood that we could not do more until we had progressed things like the financial management shared service. We have moved, as a result, our emphasis and focus to the issues that were highlighted in the OECD report on parliamentary scrutiny of the budget.

In terms of the specific outcomes from the European project, members will understand that when Europe provides very significant resources, given that we do not know exactly how much the project will cost, it is very focused on what the outcomes should be.