Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

Dr. Casey can correct me if necessary. The good news is that the Government has essentially moved towards an approach where it forecasts current spending as increasing in line with how one would expect it to increase. Whichever measure is used, one can see that current spending is expected to grow a bit faster than even our estimate of the standstill costs. That was not true in the past, which was implausible. There has at least been a big step forward in producing credible forecasts because there is enough money there. Unfortunately, the Government has not produced a great deal of information for the later years. It has for 2022, but for the medium term, it has not set out its thinking on matters. It has set out an allocated amount but what that amount covers is not clear. There is no economic sense of what the allocation is. It is just a decision taken by the Government to allocate this amount. In some other publications, for example, the mid-year expenditure review, the Government included higher numbers in those years that were more similar to the fiscal space numbers. It is a conceptual difference. In this instance, the Government has used some concepts of allocation without spelling out what that allocation means. The standstill costs are well defined and the Deputy can read our work on it. Over the summer, the Government was using numbers that were more detailed and similar to ours. Obviously, there are methodological differences but the gap is quite large and, therefore, it is not a methodological issue but a conceptual one and the Government is not including the full standstill amount.