Professor Michael McMahon:

For some of it, yes. Members of this committee do not need the short history lesson on its origins. When it first came in, it related to Covid. At that time, I think it made sense. It certainly was a societal fiscal support that we have not seen here or elsewhere before. I do not necessarily think the spending has to be incredibly transient or temporary to qualify as non-core. It can be something like Covid, where it is reasonable to say that, as a society, we agreed this was an unusual event, we needed to support the whole of society as much as we could, and we put a bunch of money into the economy and did not think of it as a big shift in policy but that it would be there as long as it had to be there. When it first came in, we had no idea. We did not sit here but we sat at our computer screens at home and beamed in to the committee and made this point. That made sense. In the same way, you can make an argument that, as a society, if we have chosen that the spending on support for Ukrainian refugees is something that is not going to be permanent but is an important societal thing we are doing and we are willing to treat it outside of the normal realms, we would be okay with that. The thing with which we would take greater issue is chucking in other things that are naturally core spending and justifying it on the grounds that we only mean them to be there for a year.