Dr Emma Howard

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It's not surprising because, you know, as has been outlined, it is in the programme for government.

But what it is, I think, is it's too early to be talking about that because we have absolutely no idea what is going to happen between now and the budget.

And, you know, the government in their economic statement rightly modelled and forecast different scenarios.

And, you know, in the most adverse scenario,

we could be looking at inflation spiking at 6.5% towards the end of the year.

So, you know, the other issue here is that, and I think like the opposition are pushing for more spending, the package that's already been introduced is a huge level of spending.

And this government have been spending over and above a sustainable amount for a number of years now.

So if you look at the current projections for this year, revised to 7.6% increase in spending, you know, there had been a 5% sustainable spending rule in place

Minister Harris came in and raised that to 6%, but the government are once again breaching that, what they themselves had said would be the sustainable level.

And what happens, and I think it's really important for people to understand, because there is this political pressure.

People do want supports.

They want these universal supports.

Everyone wants a little bit of help.

But when those universal measures are put in place...

And everyone from those lowest income households to the richest households in the country gets those supports.

What it does is it feeds inflation.

So that 6.5% worst case scenario towards the end of the year, that could be another percent or so higher if we have a huge increase in government spending.

Because again, in all of the projections, we're actually in the lucky situation and unique really, or one of the unique ones across Europe is,

that we're still predicting economic growth this year.