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Only last weekend, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning announced that she had increased the school estate fund—a de-ring-fenced grant—to £117 million next year.
Now we know that, as “Sark runs over the Solway sands”, they are shifting sands and that somehow or other we have to pin down the boundary. If only Alexander II or Henry III had thought about their own Scottish adjacent waters boundary order, we could have had this sorted.
The convention is that we do not go into detail on such matters.In addition, time bars are usually decided by the courts, which will interpret the legislation and come to their own view. Anyone who wanted to pin down a time bar or challenge the legislation would be able to go to the courts and ask them to decide what the time bar was.
It seems to be clumsy to have two different categories, but I accept that we are dancing on the head of a pin. I suppose that that is in the nature of the amendments.
The quite detailed specification that we have given the companies to work with has, I hope, helped us to pin down as concrete a figure as we can get at the moment.
With the referendum, in contrast, it is de novo, so we cannot be sure whether the things that need to be done to get a general election right necessarily apply to the referendum.
Moving the legal framework might change the implication subtly. If the de facto framework changes, it will probably have a significant, long-term effect on the type of conversations that are had and societal expectations.