During his statement on the local government settlement, the cabinet secretary told me:"It is clear that capital acceleration has an impact on the capital budgets; we cannot accelerate capital expenditure and then have to claw it back without seeing a difference in the numbers—that is rather elementary arithmetic."—Official Report, 26 November 2009; c 21566.Such elementary arithmetic was missing from the First Minister when, during last week's First Minister's question time, he said that the pre-budget report resulted in"a reduction of £814.4 million.