Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. This debate has been much more valuable than I expected when we started. We discovered in the imperfect drafting of Clause 5(3) a real drafting difficulty, which has nothing to do with trying to make any political or more general economic point, but just concerns clarity. That was very valuable. I want to return to this, and want to associate with the notion of sustainability a general notion of economic policy. The reason for that is illustrated by the Irish case. The Irish Government looked incredibly stable in 2007, yet the overall economic position was completely unsustainable. If you just looked narrowly at the government finances, they looked terrific, but once you placed those government finances in the context of what was happening in the financial sector in Ireland as a whole, taking into account the Government’s economic policy with respect to the banks, for example, you would have seen that the position was unsustainable. It is that broader context that I was trying to get at here, and which informed my remarks on the sustainability analysis in the report published on Monday. We have teased out some important issues here, and we must certainly return to them at Report but, in the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 19 withdrawn.