Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I welcome from the Department of Finance Wendy Lecky, Julie King and Sarah Wilson. Julie and Sarah are both from the Fiscal Council Bill team. It is really good to have you all here. I am delighted that we are able to scrutinise legislation about the Fiscal Council, as it is really important stuff. Wendy, I ask you to make an opening statement, perhaps in conjunction with the others.

Ms Wendy Lecky (Department of Finance): Thank you, Chair, Deputy Chair and members for inviting us today. It is a welcome opportunity for us to meet you as part of the Committee's scrutiny of the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council Bill. I am joined today by colleagues who have been leading on the work with me. Sarah Wilson is a deputy director and heads up the Fiscal Council Bill and sponsorship team. Julie King is the deputy principal on that team.

I will briefly explain how we have got here. The Fiscal Council, as you all know, has been operating now for over four years on a non-statutory basis under the leadership of Sir Robert Chote, who has been before the Committee on a number of occasions, contributing significantly to public debate and independent scrutiny of the Executive's finances. The general view, I hope that you will all agree, is that the Fiscal Council has been operating successfully as a non-statutory body. The Fiscal Council Bill will, however, provide a legislative underpinning for its work, thus safeguarding its independence and ensuring that it has access to information. Those are all vital components of its role.

The council was initially established based on the nine broad principles that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has recommended for independent fiscal organisations, and those principles were taken into account as we developed the Bill. The functions in the Bill provide the council with a very broad remit to assess and comment on our public finances and their sustainability. In line with the OECD principles, it will then be for the council to determine its own work programme in that mandate. The Bill does, however, require the council to publish a Budget assessment report and a fiscal sustainability report each year.

In considering the council's functions, the Bill team considered those of institutions elsewhere and also our own country-specific needs. We realise, however, that the role of the Fiscal Council may expand over time to take account of local developments. The Bill therefore allows for additional functions to be added, subject to agreement by the Executive and the Assembly, and could include, for example, expanding the council's functions to cover economic forecasting, as had been raised previously. We have provided further information on that in our briefing paper. We have also set out in the paper some further information on the classification of the council and the associated budget setting, as well as information on access to information, which I hope will be useful as the Committee considers the Bill.

Although the council chair and members have indicated that they do receive the information that they need from Departments in order to perform their functions, the Bill includes a duty to guarantee in legislation the council's right of access to government information that is required for its purposes. Independence and being able to carry out its work free from political influence are prerequisites for having a successful independent fiscal institution. The Bill has therefore been drafted to provide the council with discretion to present its analysis with objectivity and free from the direction or control of others. That safeguards the council's operational independence, which is one of the nine OECD principles.

Another important aspect of independent fiscal institutions is the need for clear separation of analysis, which will be the role of the council, from policymaking, which is the responsibility of Ministers and their Departments.

The Bill sets out that distinction.

To ensure transparency, the Bill requires the council to publish all the documents that it produces. The council already does that, having published over 20 reports since its formation. That requirement will help continue to build trust and credibility with the public, alongside informing the wider debate around public finances. The Bill also sets out the details of the membership, staffing and other operational matters of the council, including arrangements for evaluation of its work.

I hope that that short update has helped provide an overview of the principles of the Bill. We welcome any questions.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Thank you very much. Members, as always, please indicate if you wish to ask a question of our witnesses. That was comprehensive but relatively concise, which is the sweet spot for opening statements. [Laughter.]

Ms Sarah Wilson (Department of Finance): That is what we were hoping for.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): It does not always happen.

You raised a point about clause 5, which is titled "Power to confer additional functions". Thank you for mentioning in your paper that there may be some merit in considering expanding the council's functions to include economic forecasting. Am I summarising it correctly by suggesting that the Department is saying that that may happen at some point in the future but not right now?

Ms Lecky: Yes. We have looked at what our local needs are right now and consulted the council as well, and the view is that now is not the right time to look at doing economic forecasting. The vast majority —.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Do you mean "not the right time" in the sense that you would have to recruit a load of economists and create a model?

Ms Lecky: That as well, but it is really about what the purpose of doing so would be. Look at the Scottish Fiscal Commission (SFC), for example. Before it was set in statute, it already had some small taxes devolved to it, and, as that commission was being put into statute, more devolved taxes were being brought on board, so the timing seemed to be right for it. At the moment, however, the majority of our funding comes from the block grant, and it is not really influenced by the local economy here. If the Executive were to decide that they wanted to have further taxes devolved to Northern Ireland, the performance of the local economy would influence the revenue streams coming into the Executive.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): The Budget documents that the Department produces always have an economic context. I would argue that they are a little bit disconnected. The text is a little bit like, "By the way, this is the performance of the Northern Ireland economy, and here are a load of decisions that we are making about how we allocate spending". Clearly, there is some kind of acknowledgement that the two are connected, or that they should be connected. Why not therefore build in the ability to connect them a bit more now rather than wait for future fiscal devolution, which may well not happen, although I think that it should?

Ms Lecky: The Department's Budget document outlines what is happening in the economy now by drawing on the range of published data. It will draw on the likes of forecasting from the Ulster University Economic Policy Centre (UUEPC) on where it sees the economy going. The Budget document therefore pulls together a summary of what other producers provide. If, however, you were to ask the Fiscal Council to do economic forecasting in the same way in which the Scottish Fiscal Commission does, that would be a very different ask. The council could possibly do that — it can consider whether it wants to provide an economic context — but that would be different from asking the council to take on the role of doing formal economic forecasting.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): One might say that, when it comes to the argument about fiscal devolution, the only way in which economic performance matters to policymaking at Stormont is if there is more fiscal devolution — that is, if our revenue is more dependent on local economic performance — whereas, in fact, we have an entire Department for the Economy, which is apparently responsible, to some extent, for economic performance. It is the same for all other Departments, including the Department for Communities and the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs. Is it therefore not wrong to say that economic performance matters to policy only if some revenue is dependent on it? Should we not be saying that economic performance should be at the core? For example, if an economy is performing well, children are more likely to be raised out of poverty and society is likely to be healthier, with fewer people on long-term benefits and placing less of a burden on the health service. Is that not the wrong way of thinking about, then? Should we not be saying that we need economic forecasting to be in there because we need the watchdog to say, for example, "These are the economic impacts of investment in the health service"? One judgement that the council might then make is that, assuming that the policy goes right, an investment of x in the health service might lead to an economic output of y, because it believes that that investment would lead to fewer people being economically inactive.

Ms Lecky: Yes. There are others that do that, and that the council could draw on their work. From what I understand, the vast majority of fiscal institutions out there comment on what others produce, as opposed to doing their own forecasting.

It goes back to what you said at the start about the fact that significant resource would be required in order to put economic forecasting in place. That is absolutely the case. Doing economic forecasting would require specialist economist staff. They would be additional staff, over and above those who work for the council currently.

That is the view that Sir Robert would have on that. I am sure that you will have him up to the Committee, and that is something that you can ask him then. He has been quite clear that he thinks that the council's focus, for now, should be on assessing the Budget and the sustainability of finances.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Sir Robert has said similar things about doing full-blown economic forecasting, but I do not think that the Fiscal Council takes a firm position on what should or should not be in the Bill.

You said that other things are done. Is it Ulster Bank that sponsors an economic index? There is one from the UUEPC.

Ms Lecky: There is one from Ernst and Young (EY). There is a variety of them done.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Could the Fiscal Council not, with much less resource, do these two things: create a kind of composite that is just an average, whereby it would be obliged to publish an analysis that would almost be a mirror of what the Executive do with the Budget; and, if necessary, or if it is deemed to be appropriate, contract in economic analysis on specific policies? Might the Department be open to those ideas?

Ms Lecky: The Department for the Economy already pulls together a composite. The Fiscal Council could draw on that. That was certainly done when I was in that Department, and we published it as part of the economic commentary. If that is something that the council were asked to do, and it needed external expertise, it could contract those in. In order to make the best use of the resource, we would need to make sure that what we asked the council to do did not duplicate what is already being done out there and that it focused on what we need it to do now. That is something for the Committee to consider.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That is helpful. Thank you. I am sure that there will be further discussions, but thank you for being upfront in addressing that.

The Committee has just been discussing the question of who has oversight responsibility for the Fiscal Council. The Bill has it as being the Department. There has been some discussion about whether it should be, for example, the Assembly's Audit Committee or some other entity that is ostensibly more independent. Why not have that? What is wrong with the latter having oversight?

Ms Wilson: We started by looking at the classification of the body and then at who the sponsor body is. In doing that, we looked at 'Managing Public Money Northern Ireland' and at the Cabinet Office guidance on how to establish an arm's-length body (ALB) and then decided on the most appropriate classification. The budget will, by default, be based on that. We have considered all the guidance that is there.

In both 'Managing Public Money NI' and Cabinet Office guidance, it clearly says that "Non-Ministerial Department" or "corporate sole" — the classification of any body that would be answerable to the Audit Committee — is rarely viewed as the best option. That is the advice from 'Managing Public Money NI' and from Cabinet Office guidance. It states that unique and specific circumstances should be demonstrated for the classification of that in that respect. When we considered the best classification for the Fiscal Council, we also engaged with the Treasury and the Office for National Statistics, which makes a judgement on whether it is a public body. Its view is that it should be a non-departmental public body, and the budget is set from that. It then falls under a Department to be the sponsor of that. The question that you may have is, "Which Department?" The Department of Finance is driving forward the Bill and has been involved in the establishment of the Fiscal Council, so we felt that it was the best fit. We looked at all ALBs across the Northern Ireland setting, such as the Criminal Justice Inspection. Its sponsor body is the Department of Justice, but our current non-statutory Fiscal Council has demonstrated very clearly that it is independent of all Departments and will look at the budgets of all Departments. We have no concerns about the Fiscal Council being sponsored by the Department of Finance.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): In the nicest possible way, you are the Department of Finance, so you would say that, would you not?

Ms Wilson: Of course. When we look at other bodies that have been set up, such as Criminal Justice Inspection — it is the Department of Justice — we see that the Department of Finance is probably the best fit if we are setting it up as a non-departmental public body and we follow the guidance and advice on that.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): To unpack that a bit, you have referred to 'Managing Public Money NI' and Cabinet Office guidance that, ideally, it should not be a non-ministerial Department, which is what it would be if it went through to the Audit Committee or some other area. What is the downside?

Ms Wilson: It would mean that the Audit Committee would be responsible for all the sponsorship arrangements, such as the recruitment of the Chair and the members and the budget-setting. I feel like a saleswoman here essentially, but the other aspect is that the budget is set by the Audit Committee, but the Department of Finance provides input into that when it is set, and that is the budget. If it is set up as a non-departmental public body, it will have the benefit of in-year monitoring. If it requires additional funding, we can allocate that via the Department if there are additional functions that we want it to carry out or if it needs additional funds. There is a benefit to that as well.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Theoretically, it would not necessarily be the Audit Committee. It could be this Committee — I am not endorsing that; I am just saying — it could be the Assembly Commission or it could be another entity. That would require very complicated amendments, so I am not advocating that. However, you made the point that, effectively, if the Fiscal Council needs extra money in-year to do its work, the Department has the flexibility because it is the main budget-setting Department of the Executive. It can say, "Here is an extra £50,000", or whatever amount of money, and you can manage that as the sponsor Department, and you can explain to us in departmental returns why that happened.

The corollary to that is that it does create, in theoretical moments when the Fiscal Council is perhaps saying —. I am not saying that it would come under political pressure. For what it is worth, the current Finance Minister seems pretty robust about getting independent oversight, and that is good. However, we do not know what the position will be. A Fiscal Council will have to say difficult things to a Finance Minister. There is a potential scenario, and I am not saying that it will definitely happen, where a Finance Minister or Finance Department could — I am not necessarily saying that it would do that as punishment, but, when looking for savings, it could say, "Everyone has to save, so the Fiscal Council will have to lose". Where is the independence there? I cannot think of another example offhand, but there is a difference with the Fiscal Council because it is providing scrutiny. Do you see what I mean there? Do you recognise that there is some kind of tension there?

Ms Wilson: There is, and, by following the guidance, we do not see that —. The Fiscal Council has unique and specific circumstances to demonstrate that it should be treated differently. The Finance Committee has a scrutiny role over the Department. If we should remove or reduce funding to limit it, I would expect the Finance Committee to take exception to that as part of its scrutiny of the Department, and —

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): We cannot stop it.

Ms Wilson: — there is a method —.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): We cannot stop it. We can scrutinise it and say it is bad, but, ultimately, if the Minister and the Department decide that it is happening, the Fiscal Council might go from six staff to two, c'est la vie.

Ms Wilson: I cannot imagine that the Fiscal Council would not create enough of a case. I am trying to think of any time across the Civil Service when the functions of an ALB — we have many — were restricted by removing or reducing the budget. It would be quite an unusual thing to do.

Ms Lecky: It would mean that we would not be able to deliver on the terms of reference and the legislation.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): It is often the case that a Department takes a different view from an arm's-length body on how much resource it needs to perform its statutory function. That is not unusual. You are saying to me that there is a barrier to the Department just saying, "You can have half of what you had last year, and do your job. We judge that is more than sufficient for you to do that". Yes, we would scrutinise it, but this legislation provides nothing to stop that. It is our job to scrutinise the BIll and to look at all the parameters. Currently, the legislation provides nothing to prevent the Department from saying, "This year, your budget is £0·5 million, but because we are tightening our belts, it will be £300,000 next year. Deal with it". At which point, the Fiscal Council could say privately, and then publicly, that the funding is preventing it from performing its statutory functions. At that point, the answer will effectively be "Tough".

Ms Wilson: Likewise, the Audit Committee could reduce the budget significantly, and the Department of Finance would be consulted as part of that process. Both those scenarios could lead to the same position.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): They could, but the corollary would be that that would be a direct decision by one of the main customers, which is the democratically elected Assembly, were that to happen. The Fiscal Council is not critiquing the Audit Committee, so it is less likely to be a potential theoretical conflict of interest. I am unpacking all these things and asking challenging questions for scrutiny.

Ms Forsythe: Thank you all for being here. I will put a slightly more positive swing on things: it is great to see this progressing through the Committee. We want this for Northern Ireland, and we want it to be the best that it can be to provide that type of scrutiny. Northern Ireland does not have a separate Treasury function, so we have all that within the two strands of the Department of Finance, which adds a slightly different dimension. Joanne McBurney and the team come here to deal with the supply side, and we also have the departmental management under Gavin Patrick, and we are clear about that. It makes sense that the Fiscal Council should also recognise the two parts of the Department of Finance.

You mentioned where it sits and whether it can benefit from the in-year monitoring, and that is an important thing to raise. It is not just about whether a wee bit of extra money is needed to do the work. It actually gives scope if something is going on in the Assembly or the Executive. The Executive or the Assembly could be saying, "We need a piece of work here", during the year if something quite exceptional comes up. For example, last year, late in the year, the Infrastructure Minister called for the forensic accounting of NI Water. Something like that could be found in in-year monitoring through the Fiscal Council. It is important to remember that.

Ms Lecky: It gives us flexibility.

Ms Forsythe: If something exceptional comes up during the year, it has that opportunity there, which is good. We have listed all the Fiscal Council's pieces of work, and when it is going into the legislation, I am always concerned that legislation can be restrictive because it is listing what you can do. Do you think that enough discretion, or enough of a suggestion of discretionary work, has been built in? We have got "Power to confer additional functions", which allows the Department to give extra functions to the council, but is there a mechanism by which the council could say, "We think there should be work on this", or by which this Committee or the Executive could feed in?

Ms Lecky: It has been given a broad remit, but it must produce a Budget assessment and a sustainability report each year. That is a given; it cannot get away from that. It is set up in a way in which there is flexibility so that it can do other work over and above that within the public finance remit as it sees fit. That is what it has been doing. It has been in operation for only four years, and it has published over 20 reports. I think that six of those were Budget assessments, and it has done four sustainability reports. The rest are ad hoc technical pieces of work on areas that it thought might be useful in the public finance transparency space. It is built in there that it can do that. The council feels that the Bill gives it the flexibility to continue to be able to do that.

Ms Forsythe: That is good, because it is an important piece. In line with what I said, if money were available during the year to do discretionary pieces, that gives it a really firm status to be able to do that good work.

The schedule talks about the way that the accounts will be and where they will be consolidated into. Again, maybe it is just an optional thing as opposed to something that needs to be in legislation as to how and in what way the Fiscal Council could report on return on investment in its work. That is something that does not always get captured. I sit on the Audit Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. The Northern Ireland Audit Office has its budget and does a lot of work. It has a measure that it publicises: "It costs this much to keep this office, but this is the amount of money that the Audit Office saves" in terms of value-for-money returns and that type of thing. Maybe that is something to build on operationally to make sure that the Fiscal Council reports on that. The Fiscal Council brings value through economic appraisals and projections. It will push back on and challenge not just the Department of Finance's treasury function but the entire Executive. I would love to see it being able to capture that, so that it can give a headline figure and say, "This is what our output is", in more qualitative terms. Maybe that could be built in operationally, rather than —.

Ms Lecky: We can consider that and talk to it about some of the work that it has done around relative need and leading up to the spending review. Lots of positive things came out of that through the work that it had done. That is something that we could discuss with it.

Ms Forsythe: It is a good news story. It is something that it is doing. I do not want it to be just cold, hard numbers going in and out. As the Chair said, when you are making cuts, you are slicing a bit off. The impact of a little slice out of the Fiscal Council on the outcome of the work and the spending for Northern Ireland could be disproportionately significant and not be beneficial. That was very helpful.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Nobody else has indicated.

Mr Kingston: Chair —.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Sorry, Brian. Do indicate, members.

Mr Kingston: Indeed. Apologies, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): We are much less free and easy on this Committee; we like to do things by the book. Go ahead, Brian.

Mr Kingston: Similar to what you asked about earlier, Chair, I am trying to understand how decisions about the council are made. The wording is that appointments are made "by the Department". The remuneration and allowances are:

When it comes to committees, payments are as the council:

determines. What does that mean in practice? What is meant by "the Department"? Is that the permanent secretary?

Ms Lecky: In this case, it is the Minister. Our plan is to go out for a public appointments process for the chair and the members once the council is on a statutory basis. There is a well-established process through the Commissioner for Public Appointments for Northern Ireland. That code stipulates that the relevant Minister should make those appointments. The Minister would not be involved in the interview panel process but would have the final say on who the chair or the new members would be.

Mr Kingston: On democratic accountability or whatever, it comes to the Minister, but with a recommendation from officials.

Ms Lecky: From the panel that is set up. It might not necessarily be all local officials. You could bring in external expertise from elsewhere onto the panel. That is something that we are considering.

Mr Kingston: Just for my own understanding, are there six members on the council?

Ms Lecky: There are four at the minute, but the legislation allows for six. We have a chair and three members.

Ms Wilson: That was due to the fact that we wanted to build flexibility into it. You will have seen the Ulster University response and its comments on overlap. It means that, as one member leaves, we can bring in an additional member. If we had said "four" in legislation, it would have always had to be four. It gives us the flexibility to overlap and transfer skills between members or the chair, so that they can stay on for a period and pass on that knowledge, skills and expertise.

Mr Kingston: Has the council established committees?

Ms Wilson: No, it does not currently have any, but we wanted to build in the flexibility, should the council want to set up a committee. It can set up a committee as it is, but this is a statutory committee that might have some of the statutory functions allocated to it. It has the capacity, in legislation, to set it up, but, currently, it does not operate it. We want to make sure that, if it did, it could do so under the legislation.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): On that, I am going to go back to the document that I am sure everyone has read: the OECD document on principles for independent fiscal institutions. The Department's view is that it broadly matches what is in the OECD document. Resources is the fourth principle. Number one is local ownership, number two is independence and non-partisanship. These are the principles published by the OECD. Under "Resources", there is a preamble about commensurate resources, but then it says that the appropriations for independent fiscal institutions:

There is a slight tension there between treating the institution like an audit office and treating it as the Bill treats it, which is as an arm's-length body of the Department.

Ms Wilson: An NDPB, yes. It says that they have to be adequately resourced. To date, the Department has protected its budgets, because the Department sees the value in the council — across the board, we have seen the value of it. The OECD principles are designed to be global. We take that on board. The other side is that we look to our colleagues in the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which is also a non-departmental public body, and operates very successfully independently of the Treasury, even though the Treasury is its sponsor Department.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Are people not happy with the OBR at the minute?

Ms Wilson: You have more inroads there than I do.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I suppose what I am trying to say it that its being a creature of central government, even if it is in legislation, means that there is a potential for —. Whereas something that is more independently — more like the Congressional Budget Office, for example. That is another one. Its primary customer is the legislature — the US Congress. Obviously, there is a separation of powers there. They established it — I do not know when — and it provides non-partisan financial advice. For the purposes of testing it all to destruction, what would be the problem with saying, "We appreciate the fact that the Fiscal Council was created by the Finance Department. I recognise that successive Finance Ministers have treated it with respect and that it has been of benefit, and we have had consistency of staff in the council and the secretariat, but actually the Assembly thinks that it wants this to be our advisory body. It is doing the same job, basically, but, explicitly in statute, its primary responsibility is to advise the Assembly"? It is always worth saying, because certain people always say otherwise, that the Assembly is its own body. The Assembly is a core part of the Good Friday Agreement, not just the Executive. What is the Department's view on the downside of that? Maybe I am being too facetious.

Ms Wilson: We spent a considerable amount of time considering it. It was not that we just decided to follow the route —.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): No, I know that, and I appreciate your indulging my questions.

Ms Wilson: We have followed all the guidance. We have no objections to it, if that is what is required. However, we need to be careful. This is the Fiscal Council being set up, but if we go against the current guidance, any ALB could say that it would like to be sponsored by the Assembly and the Audit Committee. To be clear, we do not say that the Fiscal Council is an advisory body. It is independent of the Assembly, the Executive and the Departments, so it is not an advisory body. It is there to provide independent commentary on Northern Ireland's fiscal circumstances and public finances. Again, I want to be really careful that, however the council is set up, it is done right, because many ALBs might feel that they would rather answer to the Audit Committee —

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): The legislature.

Ms Wilson: — and it is about the Audit Committee's capacity and the most appropriate way.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): It is important to say that it does not necessarily have to be the Audit Committee. It is the legislature. It is about the relationship with the legislature. In my view, it is about us being a serious legislature. I am not saying whether it is right or wrong, but the question that I am asking is about us taking our responsibilities as a legislature seriously. Sometimes, we forget that we are not just a rubber stamp for the Executive, regardless of whether you are in an Executive party, the Opposition or an independent MLA. It is just a question, but I appreciate your answer.

No members have indicated that they wish to ask a question. Thank you very much. I do not know whether you wanted to draw our attention to that we have not covered today.

Ms Wilson: No. We will continue to watch as the evidence comes forward, and we will respond as swiftly as possible. We are happy to attend Committee again as required.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I have one quick thing to ask before you go, sorry. In the schedule, there are some disqualifications for appointment. They include people who have been bankrupt in the past 10 years and people who are currently civil servants. You cannot be a serving civil servant so neither of you —.

Ms Lecky: We cannot apply, no.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): If you applied, you would have to leave your current job. You could apply and then leave. I am not saying that you should or would do that.

Ms Lecky: Leave and apply, I think.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Oh, really? Is that not a problem? Surely some of the people who would be good at the role might be current civil servants or employees in the Department.

Ms Wilson: You cannot apply as a current civil servant. You would have to leave the Civil Service and then apply.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That is interesting. Surely it is very unusual for people to leave their job and then apply for a job after being unemployed.

Mr Kingston: You would have to leave first, Matthew.

Ms Lecky: Being a member or the chair is a part-time job as well. The fact that it is not a full-time job is something to consider.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I just wanted to clarify that. Any other questions? Grand. I know that some of the questions were a bit annoying, but that is our job. There may be more annoying questions in the next few months.

Ms Lecky: No, that is fine.

Ms Wilson: You do not want to leave and apply, Matthew, do you?

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Well, no.

Ms Lecky: We will try to answer them all.

Mr Kingston: out.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): No. I do not think that I would get the job. None of you would give it to me, if the Assembly had a say in it. I will take it as a compliment, though I am sure that it was not intended as such. Thank you.