Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

This is the right way of thinking about it. The level of investment that we have now is historically the highest share of national income. Government investment is somewhere around 6% nationally. Most European countries are possibly at around 3% or 4%, so this is a very high level of investment. As the Deputy rightly points out, the real constraint is not actually finding the money to finance it, it is the capacity of the economy and the construction sector to absorb this without running up costs. We wrote a paper about this a year ago but, unfortunately, the people who wrote it are not with me today and my memory is a little bit sketchy. Thousands of extra workers will be needed to meet the Government's target in the housing sector alone. We are in a period of very low unemployment, and there are not a massive number of people around, either with the right skills or even just around, who could contribute to that. The real constraint on all of this is the capacity at which we can build houses and insulate houses, which is very important for climate change, and at which we can build other forms of infrastructure. That is the limit. Trying to increase capital spending even more is likely to run up higher costs, as we were discussing earlier.

In terms of the overall macroeconomic imbalance, we could achieve this by funding it through higher taxes as well. That would only help with the overall macroeconomic balance, however. It would not necessarily mean that there were more people around who could lay bricks or fit windows.