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No. What we are talking about is that, if we had factored those pay increases into our assumptions earlier on, when we had to lay a budget that balanced at that point in time, there would have been significant cuts in public services much earlier in the process.

Are you saying that we should not have awarded those pay deals?

We cannot lean on it again and again.

There has been visibility on it for quite a period.

I did not say that.

I suppose that you would not necessarily know how much that transfer was going to be, which would come down to policy decisions. You are right that, on the surface, it looks unnecessarily complex, but the way it works is that the policy area makes the decisions on how much the spend will be—it is responsible for doing that.

You cited the example of education and training. The decision on how to take that forward would have been made in the health and social care portfolio, which has responsibility for that budget line. It is education that would deliver those services, so the funding would be transferred to education to enable it to fund that delivery. If you look through the budget, that is typically the reason for such a scenario. However, we are very transparent about what those transfers are as part of this process.

I understand that. As I said, that underspend is about 2 per cent of the total budget. You would run those big capital projects with various issues, be it inflation or timeline slippage. Many factors are involved in large capital projects that can make that margin of difference at the edges, and that is what we are seeing here.

Exactly. Are you saying that we should have cut public services to that extent previously?

Do you mean in relation to private sector investment?

What you have done mid-year is create another £1 billion of spending cuts. You recognise—