Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

The country with the best practice on any budgeting question is always the Netherlands. It has a particular system, which may not be fully transferable to here. What we have now is a 5% target, which can be carried forward, and if the Government follows that, it will show how much it spends in total, but we cannot see how it plans to spend it between different things. It is fine that the Government keeps back some money and says that because it does not know exactly what the needs are going to be, it is going to keep this back as a kind of kitty, but saying that, for example, health is going to cost more because of staffing, that we know we are going to need to spend more on housing supports or that there is a discussion about spending more on defence, and starting to put those things into the budget, will help it. Moreover, it will lead to better management because rather than Departments spending a lot of time trying to get as much money as they can in October, they should be thinking about how much money they have and how they can use it in the best possible way.

In the report, we mention strengthening the spending review process. There is a spending review process in Ireland and it produces lots of interesting research, which economists such as me find interesting to read. In countries that carry out good spending review processes, they look at whether the government is getting value for money, whether it is doing the correct things and whether it could provide the same things in a more cost-effective way. We are not doing that in Ireland. That just adds to the pressure because there are potentially savings that could be made and, ultimately, better public services could be provided.