Chamber and committees

I thank Professor Roy, Professor Breedon and Claire Murdoch for their contributions today. No doubt we will see you in the not too distant future.

You have said that Barnett consequentials are hard to reproduce.

It would have to come from the NHS budget, policing, local government or whatever.

At this point, I will not ask you exactly how you are doing that.

In your report, you spoke about

“higher spending on disability payments associated with higher demand than we forecast, a trend which has also arisen for disability payments in the rest of the UK.”

That has led to further pressure on our social security budget, which is higher by about 1 per cent than was anticipated. Obviously, a 1 per cent increase in a £5.3 billion spend is significant. Do you have any views on why that happened?

A lot of it is housekeeping as much as anything else.

I was looking at paragraph 2.11 as you were speaking, which talks about that. That is a very important point.

I also notice that the responses to labour force surveys have been declining over the years, so there is an issue or concern about accuracy.

Thank you. That has exhausted questions from colleagues, but I have a couple more to finish off with. One of the issues is that we have had six-month spending reviews rather than multiyear or even annual spending reviews, with the budget having to be revisited in an emergency context every summer.

Go on. I am just talking about it from a sustainability and scrutiny perspective, not necessarily from a policy point of view. If we knew where we were and what was going to happen come May, because money had been allocated to certain budgets and the organisations to which that money had been allocated—whether it be the NHS, local government or the culture sector—knew that that was the money that they had to spend, would that not be much more sustainable than having to keep going back to find additional money from somewhere in the budget?

The commission has made it clear that it believes that we should have short, medium and long-term financial projections in any case, whether we have multiyear pay settlements or not. Is that not the case?

Or higher taxes. Thanks very much. Do you want to make any further points before we wind up the meeting?