Ms Deirdre Donaghy:

It is probably less important that we decide whether we call it benchmark or expenditure and more important that the information be gathered, made available and discussed for policy reasons. One of the improvements made in recent years is that much more information is being published and put into the public domain. It is more important that we keep doing that and that we agree between ourselves, to the extent we can do so, to be more consistent in our terminology but the last thing we want to do is suddenly decide we will only report on some kind of commonly agreed idea of what the benchmark is. It is best we try to keep producing as much as we can and then try to be more consistent on naming among ourselves.