Hello, and welcome to the Negotient podcast. I'm David Gauke. And I'm John Hall.

So just to introduce Negotient, Negotient is an expert advisor in managing negotiations specifically between public and private sector entities. And the plan in our podcast is to talk a little bit about the strategies and behind-the-scenes mechanics that shape successful negotiations. And our aim is to help those who are involved in negotiations with the public sector to understand the challenges they face and how they might address them to deliver better results in the future.

I'm chair of Negotient. John is one of our associates. My background is as a former treasury minister, chief secretary to the treasury, also financial secretary and executive secretary.

I was also Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and also for Justice.

My background is on the other side of Whitehall. I worked as a deputy director in the Treasury to four Chief Secretaries. Unfortunately, David wasn't one of them.

I've worked with a two Chancellors. And I was also Director of Strategy at the Department of Health and Social Care to three separate Secretaries of State from two different political parties.

So what we wanted to do today is set out a little bit of the public spending context. As you've heard, I've been a minister actually on both sides of the table when it comes to negotiations over spending settlements. John has done that role as an official.

And recently, we've had the spring statement, which gives us a bit of an indication of what to expect in the spending review in June. And we wanted to talk through what we now know, what are the things to be looking out for, what are the implications for those entities dealing with the public sector over the next few months and years. So, John, to start off, do you want to just set out a little bit of the context of what we've learned from the spring statement in terms of the state of the public finances and what that's going to mean for public spending?

Thanks, David. I mean, I think the first thing to say is the spring statement was a statement which Rachel Reeves did not want to make, that she's been very clear she wanted one annual budget, and she wanted that budget last October to set the fiscal framework of tax, public spending and borrowing for the full length of the parliament. But the Office for Budget Responsibility has got a statutory obligation to update its forecasts twice a year.

And the update that they did this month suggested that Rachel Reeves' 10 billion margin for hitting her fiscal rules in five years' time had turned into a five billion deficit. That's largely because of a slowdown in the economy last year and because interest rates were higher than had been expected. So, in a sense, Rachel Reeves was forced to turn a policy event this March from something that she hadn't expected to do.

And that does raise some questions for us, because fiscal rules were originally introduced as a way of signalling to markets that the government actually had a plan, they weren't just going to borrow forever, and also to enable a government to do long-term spending planning so they didn't have to adjust spending and tax every year if there was a downturn in the economy. We've now got into a slightly bizarre situation where the Chancellor is making policy change because of a change in forecast for five years' time, and that's a forecast that everybody knows is going to be wrong. So, she's got a headroom of 10 billion.

The average five-year forecast error is five times that. So, we run the risk that not only this fiscal event, but twice a year in the run-up to it, we're going to have endless speculation about tax and spending and micro-changes that the Chancellor will be forced to do because of changes in forecast.

There's obviously a bit of a debate at the moment, quite a lot of criticism of the fiscal rules and the OBR being too powerful. But, John, this is largely a consequence of Rachel Reeves not giving herself very much headroom back in October, and she's not given herself very much headroom today. So, as you say, we may be back in the same place in the autumn again.

I think that's right. We're in a crazy place where, and I know it's very easy to say, you know, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money, and 10 billion does sound an awful lot of money, but it's a tiny fraction of public spending and it's a tiny fraction of the forecast error. The real issue though is, because it's very easy to say she should have allowed herself more headroom, well, to do that it means she would have needed to announce bigger tax rises in October or to allow a lower growth in public spending.

And the underlying reason we're in this problem is that there's an economic growth problem in the UK economy. That prior to the financial crisis in 2007-08, with ups and downs, the economy had broadly been ticking along with productivity growing by about 2% a year for decades, and since then it's been closer to half a percent. So, fundamentally, this slowdown in the normal rate of growth of the UK economy has created an awful lot of problems.

When you add in the financial crisis, the pandemic, and dare I say, the impact of Brexit, then what we've seen is a massive increase in debt. So, back when I started in Treasury, the national debt was less than 40% of our national income. Now it's 100%.

And we were shielded from that for a lot of the last decades because interest rates were historically very low. But they've now increased. So, we're now spending over 4% of our national income every year just paying interest on the debt.

That's double what we were paying just five years ago. So, this combination of slow growth in the economy, build-up in debt, very high levels of debt interest payments, mean that the room for manoeuvre fiscally is just a lot less large than it used to be.

I think that's right. And if you look at a situation where taxes are very high by historic standards, a sense that public services are under strain, and yet we are not bringing debt down as a percentage of GDP over the next few years. It's broadly flat, which is in a period of time in which there is no recession forecast is really unusual.

You would expect to be bringing debt down over such a period because there's always something unexpected that you can't have in the forecast that is there. But I guess from the perspective of if you're dealing with the public sector, there's perhaps not the certainty on spending that you might necessarily expect. If there is a 50-50 chance that Rachel Reeves in the autumn is gonna have to do something to tighten the fiscal situation, assuming that she's gonna stick by her rules, then that does raise uncertainties as to whether there's gonna be further tax increases or further spending cuts.

So I think that's something worth bearing in mind. We're going to talk a little bit about the spending review. But as someone who was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, not during a spending review period, you still realise that these spending reviews are very much a process, not just an event.

It's not all done there and then in a spending review. There is the chance that things will change subsequently.

I think that's right, David. I mean, I think it's also worth bearing in mind that the very strange, you might say, profile of public spending over this Parliament, Rachel Reeves announced very large increases in public spending in October. But almost the big bulk of those happened in the year that's just finishing and the year that's about to start, where spending has grown by three to four percent over and above inflation.

For the three years she's about to make spending announcements for, that's just a little over one percent. So it's not austerity 2.0 and it's broadly grown in line with growth in the economy, but it's not going to feel like a particularly generous period either. And if you take out what we assume is going to happen for health, if health gets its historical average of about 3.6 percent over and above inflation, if the government sticks to the pledge it's made on increasing defence spending and then keeping that as a share of national income of 2.5 percent, and if we freeze pupil spending per head with changes in student numbers, then you're actually looking at cuts once inflation is taken into account for other spending departments.

And if you stay with the state of public services at the moment, David, I mean, I think almost one in ten local authorities next year has got some special arrangement to try and make the books balance in terms of being able to borrow to fund current spending or whatever. You know yourself issues in the criminal justice system, so we're not going into this spending review with public services on an even keel, and this is going to look very tight. Now if you combine that with the risk that rather than having three-year plans laid out and certainty that departments can plan that spending, that actually is a risk that the Chancellor is going to have to claw some of that back, that may have a real impact on what is delivered on public services over the next few years.

Okay, now let's look in a little bit more detail about what the spending review might hold, but also at the same time I want to come back to those fiscal rules that we have talked about, and one of the rules is to ensure that the current budget is balanced, but that gives you a bit more scope if you're the Treasury to spend more on capital expenditure, on investment, and we're seeing signs of that. John, what do you make of the early signs of this and how this is having an impact on spending decisions?

Yeah, so if I was going to give Rachel Reeves credit for anything, it's that in a time of fiscal constraint she's actually not just protected but increased capital spending, and often in the past governments have tried to manage budget pressures by slashing capital, that happened quite significantly back in in the 2010 budget for example. So going forwards we see much more generous capital funding for public services, and there's a bit of an issue there with the much heralded announcement that Britain was going to cut its budget on soft power, the DfID budget, and increase its budget on hard power, the Defence budget, because that wasn't really a like-for-like switch. About half the cuts on the DfID budget are capital and about half are revenue, but about 90% of the increase of the Defence budget is on capital, and that's a much higher proportion than the proportion of its total budget that the Ministry of Defence spends on capital now.

Now it might be that the thing that Defence really needs is drones and planes and guns and warships and not more soldiers or sailors, or it might be a sign of what's to come where departments are going to face a lot of capital available to deliver their spending ambitions, but much less revenue. So you might be starting to see departments looking at is there a way we can capitalise different levels of spending, in a way in the past they often tried to turn procurement into revenue streams because capital was very scarce and there was a bit more revenue knocking around. What's your experience of that David?

Well yeah, so certainly if you go back to my time as Justice Secretary, what tended to happen on an annual basis was that we couldn't get the current budget to add up, that the settlement was two ties, that we would have a capital budget, which would very often be, for example, prison building. There'd be delays in getting the money out of the door because these things can take quite a lot of time, planning issues, etc, etc. And so pretty well every year the way in which the MOJ's finances would be sorted out would be a switch of money from the capital budget into the current budget and then you'd kind of muddle through.

And people will be critical of that and say that's why we haven't built enough prisons and so on and so on, but that is the reality of what happened for some time. It strikes me as if you're going to have a very tight head level of headroom, if you like, on your current budget and you've got a more generous capital budget, that option obviously isn't going to be there. You're not going to be able to do that year by year.

So that makes it a little bit more difficult than it might look that you haven't got as much flexibility. I think there's also an interesting question as to what extent that might distort some decisions. So, you know, not being critical of the choices they're making in defence, but if your argument was we actually wanted more soldiers rather than more drones, well, no, it has to be capital spending.

So we're going to build stuff and acquire stuff rather than spend stuff. So I think that's going to be an interesting thing to watch and I think that's something that anyone who is dealing with government over the next few years is going to have to bear in mind that I think there might be relative austerity when it comes to current spending and relative generosity when it comes to capital spending. So I think that's certainly one to keep a close eye on.

And I think there's a really important issue there because while at the national level it obviously makes sense that we might be much more sanguine about the government borrowing if it's using that to invest in bridges, in railway lines, in roads, things which will deliver benefits for years to come than if they're shelling out the door and teach us salaries on nurses, salaries which you need to pay every year. But the level of individual public services, this can really screw decisions because if you've got lots of capital but not much revenue at the micro level then people will make decisions to buy kit for example as opposed to signing a service contract with a private provider irrespective of which of those procurement routes is the best value for money which is what we'd ideally like to do them for. If you think back in the day when private finance was the big show in town for getting assets then it was miraculous that all those value for money tests showed that PFI projects were going to deliver better value for money than building in the public sector. The second aspect of what you say, and we're saying this already, is governments have always struggled to ramp up capital spending quickly.

This government is trying to spend capital quickly. There was quite a significant capital underspend last year. My anticipation is what we will observe is departments coming back to treasury and saying you've given us this capital, we've not been able to spend it, but we've got real revenue pressures, can we convert it please?

Yeah and that's going to be harder. There's nothing new about that but that is going to be harder with the current fiscal rules and the current level of headroom. So one to look out for.

John I wanted to pick up one thing that Rachel Reeves talked about in her spring statement which is the transformation fund and this is obviously in the context of wanting to make more use of technology, AI and so on. It's all very Tony Blair Institute stuff about a transformation fund and that must be sensible and there must be opportunities to make use of technology here and to set aside a fund for that purpose. Certainly sounds great but is it?

What's your view and in particular given the scale of the challenge and the scale of the fund?

I mean there's always a question about if you've got a hard-bitten treasury official that you may get the more sceptical end of the spectrum on this. I think the transformation fund is the latest in the line of a long bunch of initiatives which I'd loosely label invest to save. That the public, politicians, managers look across the public services and see them ripe with inefficiency both in terms of how they do things and how they target things whether it's prevention, better prevention to stop better health care or can we get proper IT in so we stop losing medical records or we can actually get the logistics sorted out.

There's a couple of problems in that. In my experience when people came with invest to save initiatives it all was promised upfront, they wanted upfront cash to increase spending now and they promised me all sorts of good things would happen in the future in terms of lower spending. In practice that very rarely happened.

What I tended to think of a lot of these initiatives rather than saving money they were often good value spending. That if I spent four pound on something actually it would save a pound down the lines that would only cost me three pounds so it's good VFM but it's very hard to get the cash out. I think there's a number of reasons for that.

Firstly we constantly get management consultants in who say we can save lots of money by doing these things. If you look for most public services and what they're saying today it's exactly the same things as they were saying 20 years ago and we didn't get those things out. We know in health we can for example we can cut the agency nursing bill, we can reduce the need for expensive and distressing emergency medical care by better community care but it hasn't happened in fact all the trends have gone in the opposite direction.

The second thing is a lot of this evidence comes from pilot schemes and I'm a huge fan of pilots. I'm an economist and we like to trial evidence and produce it. Lots of pilots are produced by high performing teams who are very motivated, really dedicated to changing stuff and how we roll that out looks a bit different so we very rarely get the benefits when we roll stuff out that we did originally.

And the third aspect is it's very easy to identify savings, you can see efficiency anywhere. What's much harder is the hard grind of getting those out.

I think that's really helpful John. I'm sort of conscious that this is a podcast aimed at perhaps those entities who deal with the public sector but I think a few spending ministers and spending departments should be listening to this just to explain why the treasury is as sceptical as it is. I think one point I was also going to raise in terms of this transformation fund, it's not that big is it?

It's not, it's 3.4 billion over three years. I think it peaks at about 1.8 billion. That's tiny money by the standards of public services.

What I've tended to experience in the past and again apologies for being hard-bitten and cynical but a lot of departments will rebadge things they were doing or planning to do already as an efficiency saving which is part of the reasons we don't do it. I remember once in the past a nameless department putting forward a proposal that some council wanted a new town hall as an invest to save initiative. What was your experience as a secretary of state and trying to drive efficiency through your departments David?

Well I think it was it was always going to be somewhat mixed. For a long time I was essentially a spending minister although not a secretary of state at HMRC. So I was the minister for tax and in the unusual situation of being both a treasury minister and the spending minister.

So it needed something of a split personality there and HMRC was an organization that was able to drive out some inefficiencies. This was some years after the merger of the inland revenue and customs and excise but there was scope there. There was scope through new technology to drive efficiencies.

You didn't need as many tax officers as you once had so it can be done but if you look at the scale of the civil service as a whole it has grown again sort of very rapidly. So period after 2010 where you saw the civil service falling I'm struck by the fact that HMRC is now a bigger organization than it was in terms of headcount than it was I think when I stopped being the minister responsible for it. Some of that is to do with additional responsibilities as a consequence of Brexit for example.

So we have to do things now that were previously done at a European level. I don't in any way want to malign public servants and I think it's a cheap shot to do that but bureaucracies do have a tendency of growing and I think we've seen some evidence of that and the government trying to reverse that course as well. So we'll see how that plays out but it is not an easy process to drive out efficiencies.

But you would think with the arrival of AI that there must be scope here and it does struck me notwithstanding the small size of this transformation fund that there are opportunities for more public sector innovation and there are opportunities potentially for private sector entities to sort of point the way and make a contribution in terms of how that can be done. So I think that's certainly something to be looking out for.

I mean I think you raise some really great points there. I mean the first is that the 3.4 billion always sticks in my mind because about 20 years ago that's almost to a penny the amount of capital that Treasury approved to fund the transformation of IT in the NHS and the advantages of having electronic patient records so that when people turned up to their appointments they weren't cancelled because the consultant couldn't find their records or they weren't a waste of time because the test results weren't available to the clinician. You know were just amazing and the efficiency savings we were were promised were quite incredible. 20 years on there's about one in five hospital trusts still does not have one of those things.

So the promise is huge. The challenge is always how you deliver it. As a former bureaucrat I actually think it's a fair cop that every year I would always find additional pressures which my teams needed to meet which required obviously more funding very loathe to offer up any efficiency savings and I think that's why governments have traditionally when they're pursuing efficiency agendas gone for the salami slicing technique of shaving a little bit of everybody's budget. Now sometimes as in the early 20s those slices of salami are actually quite thick but it's very hard to get complex bureaucracies to volunteer the information you need to root out where the inefficiency actually is.


Yeah I think I think that that is right. I think there is also a point which ministers will be wrestling with which is partly this has to do with risk aversion, partly this has to do with sort of sizes of organisations that there isn't a huge amount of agility. There isn't the same nimbleness.

So you touched upon pilots really interesting point John about how pilots can be misleading because the people involved in a pilot are very often the most enthusiastic. So that's a fair point but I'm also struck by the point you do hear this that you know it takes a long while to get pilots up and running in a way that smaller nimbler organisations are able to do and then you know perhaps there are good reasons for that. You do have to be risk averse when you're delivering public services you can't have the system fall over but nonetheless you know I think the private sector for example has collectively been much quicker to make the use of AI than the public sector has and I'm pretty sure that ministers are going to be want to be you know pushing that as quick as as hard as they possibly can.

So I think that's one to watch over the next few months. Now we've talked a little bit about the fiscal rules and what might happen when if I should say not when if we get to the autumn and they have been broken. How do you think that debate is going to play out?

Is she going to raise taxes? Is she going to cut spending? Is she going to break her rules?

What will the treasury be saying to Chancellor Reeves in October if that's the situation she's in?

Well it's not a position that any Chancellor would want David because I think as you alluded to earlier public spending is currently pretty close to a post-war high as a share of GDP. It's increased by about five percent national income since before the pandemic and yet public services by many accounts appear broken. Tax revenues or a post-war high is a share of GDP and how much we're paying on debt service as we've said earlier is now higher than it was in the 1950s when we're paying off the debts of the second world war.

So borrowing is very high, spending is high without people feeling the benefits and tax is high so whichever way she chooses to go it's going to be a tough choice. The treasury feels very strongly that the government needs to reassure the markets that it has got a plan that that public debt doesn't increase all the time and there's a couple of reasons for that which are particularly acute at the moment. We've got a lot of debt that we need to service and that's increasingly of short-term maturity which means I think this year the treasury is looking to put out something like a couple of hundred billion dollars of debt which it needs the private sector markets to buy.

So we're very acutely tuned to what market sentiment is in terms of buying government debt and if Rachel Reeves loses their confidence then we'll see that on an increase in interest rates and it just takes an increase in interest rates of about half a percent in terms of medium-term market sentiment before she's bust her fiscal rules so she'll get caught in a trap. If she loses credibility it becomes harder to regain that because you're paying high interest rates on the debt. Could she shift the fiscal rules if we think that's a thing?

I mean I think that's very difficult that we're now seeing that as long as debt's coming down at this fixed point in five years time and without in any way being pejorative amongst a fine body of men and women who've been chancellors it's quite easy to show public spending restraint in that final year that everybody knows is not going to happen. It's very easy to pencil the indexation of fuel duties in every year which hasn't happened since 2010 so it's very easy to do a bunch of things to show that it will come down in that final year and if we think since a year ago we're still meeting the fiscal rules but the actual borrowing over the next five years is going to be 50 billion higher so I honestly don't think you can slacken these fiscal rules very much without them being a little bit pointless.

I agree with that John, I fear that some will say there's too much of a treasury consensus here but I think that does have to be right and as I say there's no sign of debt as a proportion of GDP falling even without a nasty shock to the system and there are some potentials for some nasty shocks to the system as well aren't there. You know we could see interest rates rising, we could see the OBR coming back and looking at our productivity numbers and saying actually we've been far too optimistic in the last few years and we're going to downgrade those and that's before we get into the issue of trades, President Trump and tariffs, are we going to be in a situation where trade is going to be very severely disrupted, we might have an international trade war, there's quite a lot to be nervous about.

I think that's right, the OBR has been typically over optimistic on productivity for a number of years now, that's pretty much where they are now, I mean I think we said earlier that productivity had grown by about two percent before the financial crisis, it's grown about half a percent since. The OBR says that for the next five years they're going to roughly split the difference and assume one percent. Now that's more optimistic than virtually any other forecaster is doing and I haven't seen a lot of good analysis of why that would be the case.

In fact if productivity increases at the rate it has of the post-pandemic period, it's about 0.3 percent, then Rachel Reeves will miss her rules by miles. Secondly you mentioned interest rates, I mean the primary reason why the OBR concluded she was on course to miss her targets this March was because of a 0.5 percent increase in interest rate sentiment in the medium term. I mean we're very vulnerable now because our debt is so huge, we're very vulnerable to changes in interest rates on it and of course because of this short-termness of the debt now, that would impact very quickly on new issues.

The third and perhaps the most worrying thing is the one you alluded to about the impact of potential trade wars on the world economy. The OBR used the IMF's January forecasts this year, so President Trump had been elected, he hadn't yet taken office, they didn't model any of the impact of his tariffs which he may or may not introduce and obviously there's considerable uncertainty at the moment about where they would go. I think it all adds to this feeling that to have a 10 billion margin in five years time in an incredibly uncertain world doesn't feel like a good insurance policy if you've actually set fiscal rules which you say under no circumstances will you break.

In practice pretty much all previous chancellors have changed their fiscal rules when they were starting to constrain their actions but as we said earlier it's not that obvious that Rachel Reeves can weaken these anymore before they become a bit pointless.

Yeah the previous fiscal rules were a bit tighter, they were biting at a different point in terms of the public finances but yes I think the US situation is worrying, one level it's fascinating but not in a good way and if you look at if you like I think the mindset within the Trump administration you look at some of the people around President Trump and not just his own statements which can not always as consistent as they might be but there is a sense here that America considers itself to be somewhat of a victim of others, that others are freeloaded in terms of defense, that America struggles with an overvalued currency because it's a reserve currency. You look at the comments made by Stephen Miran or a paper written by Stephen Miran who is the chair of the council of economic advisors where he argues that America should use the levers available to it in terms of forcing other countries to do what they want or tariffs will be imposed, defense support will be withdrawn and so that might be about intervention in the currency markets, that might be about funding America's defense expenditure, whatever it might be and it's a very aggressive approach that believes that power is there to be used, that relationships are largely zero-sum games and America has found itself being exploited.

Now if there's a complete change in approach and we are seeing certainly signs of that, that could make it a very different world for businesses elsewhere and I do think if I was running a business that was vulnerable to this, working out well what is it we might want from the UK government obviously, we want the UK government to negotiate a zero tariff deal and what have you but you know there are particular sectors that will be having to think through that this could be quite disastrous for us.

The approach taken by the US government, what do we do to respond, what can the government do to help us through a very difficult period and I dare say lots of people are giving some thought to that. So I suppose you know more generally what does the government do in terms of providing certainty in an uncertain world and you know here I guess this issue about a lack of fiscal headroom really doesn't help.

I'd actually like to challenge the Trumpian assumption of a zero-sum game. I think America has gained enormous benefits from having an American-led rules-based trading order which has led to open trade and has led to integration of supply chains across the planet, countries specialising according to their comparative advantage. I think we've all gained from that.

I think the lessons of history is that nobody wins a trade war. Some may lose more than others but I don't think the US is going to win the trade war either and partly that is what does business need more than anything else? It wants certainty.

If you're going to commit your investor cash now to building supply relationships for the future, to building your customer base, to investing in plant, to training your workers, you want as much certainty as possible that you're going to get a return on that and if we're moving into a world which is more disruptive, is more uncertain, where there's greater degree of risk, I think there's a significant issue that not only will the transition be disruptive but that we'll all end up losing out.

And this links to your point in terms of our governments as we saw during the financial crisis, as we saw during Covid, the ultimate insurance policies for their societies. When it all goes wrong, government is the one body which can borrow really without limit. We say fiscal rules but unlike anybody else who needs to put their collateral up or their house up to borrow, government can borrow against the future tax generating capacity of the country.

So businesses probably will look increasingly to the government to support them. A, if there's a very difficult transition period in which the UK needs to change its supply chains which needs to think a little bit more about security of supply of particular things, where these integrated supply chains we've got in things like motor vehicles where things are moving rapidly backwards and forwards across boundaries no longer applies, then we're going to need a whole bunch of transition assistance where it's to help individual industries make that transition or workers who were displaced who will need to be retrained and regrouped. So we avoid the situation of the early 1980s where the labour market is scarred by a generation who remain long-term unemployed.

But the bigger risk than that is the one that it's simply by disrupting everything reduces our long-term growth. And if there's one thing that links Kier Starmer and Liz Truss, it's that fundamental problem of the UK economy is not enough economic growth and none of this will help.

Well on a link between Kier Starmer and Liz Truss, which I'm not sure either of them will necessarily appreciate all that much, I'm sure both will be tuning in. So Liz, Kier Starmer, there you are, you're united on a desire for growth and rightly so. So John, many thanks for that.

So I think there's a few lessons to take away in terms of where we are. One, not a lot of fiscal headroom. So that does create some uncertainty in an environment where there are lots of risks.

I think we've talked a bit about what the implications of a Trump presidency might have. That seems to me to be a topic we might want to return to on another occasion. And there are some scarier scenarios that we haven't really talked about that we could get into there.

But when it comes to public spending, considerable pressures, desire for transformation, greater flexibility on the capital budget rather than the current budget, defence and the NHS doing better than other parts of the public sector, and a spending review that is going to be done in a difficult set of circumstances overall. So we'll look forward to June and how that all operates. From a Negotient perspective, we'll certainly be looking at how entities dealing with the public sector can operate in this environment, how they can optimise the relationship that is good for them, good for the public sector and good for the public as a whole, try to maximise the value of any of those relationships.

There'll certainly be a need to do that all round. But let's leave it there. John, many thanks for your time today.

And many thanks to all of you to listening to this negation podcast. I'm David Gauke. Thank you very much.