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—and police per head of the population than there are in the rest of the UK. That is very important and that is the position that we want to maintain. However, it is also absolutely clear that the spend on the public sector in general, in the area that we call corporate services, is something that we are working very hard to address. As I said, that includes recruitment in Government and more widely in those non-front-line occupations.

Yes, I would be quite comfortable with assessing where we are and laying down projections as to where the policies that we are putting in place would take us.

We had this conversation earlier. If you unpick that figure and look at the difference between resource funding for 2024-25 versus 2025-26, you find that the increase in real terms is just over £300 million—from memory, it is £328 million—which is less than 1 per cent. Does that mean that there are no pressures going forward? It does not because, as we know, there are always challenges in, for example, health spending.

The spending controls are still in place. The recruitment controls are in place. As I identified, we are accelerating a significant amount of work on how we seek to drive more efficiency through reduced savings in corporate spend, because it is the right thing to do.

We still have some uncertainty on numbers from the UK Government. The biggest one that I talked about was NIC for the public sector. Other variables are still being worked through. At the moment, we are following through with the adjustments that the cabinet secretary announced in September.

I would need to work through the details of that.

Yes. An extensive process happens as part of the budget-setting process, which involves looking at data, including historical data, and understanding what is baselined and what is not, what is transferred and what scenarios are in play in order to reach a position with each portfolio on what their future budget looks like. That is a normal part of the process.

You are not following through the logic of what actually happened. The problem is that we are in a scenario where we need to manage with very limited borrowing powers, and we need to balance the budget. That means that we need to make assumptions, as we work through the process, about things that change on a regular basis. Fiscal pressure on public spend can be driven by pay deals or inflation or other macroeconomic factors. Our budgeting depends on the consequentials that are received from the UK Government and on seeing what happens with other revenue streams and other expenses.

The process is that we manage those assumptions on a weekly basis in order to understand where the position is, within a range. We need to make decisions as we go through that, because, unlike the UK Government, we are not able to borrow money to cover those expenditures.

It is important that we protect public services, which we have done; it is important that we meet the public sector pay deal, which we have done; and it is important that we do that while balancing the budget and not overspending on our budget, which we are on course to do. On all the things that matter, we have come through it in that position.

We can certainly follow up with information on that.

Clearly, there is a timing issue in addressing the fiscal challenges that we face. The cabinet secretary felt that it was important that there was transparency on the adjustments, that people were aware of the financial position and that that was communicated as quickly as possible. You are right that impact assessments need to be done as part of the process, and they were carried out in the required timeframe, so that the information could be published. It was important for transparency that the fiscal position and the required changes were communicated as early as possible.