Professor Philip Lane:

For the bank overall, we are roughly at 1,700 now. At the end of August, the number was 1,682. September is a natural time to expand staffing. The approved total is 1,857 so there is roughly a 10% gap. That total is, in part, forward looking. We are saying we know from what we see in some areas that requirements that are not there now will be there in future. We know we will be rolling out new requirements over the next year or two so we are staffing now in anticipation of that. With regard to Brexit, we know as firms come in we will need more staff. The fact is we are continuing to expand. If one goes back in time to 2014 or so, there was probably more of a severe gap but we have grown by 5.5% between 2015 and 2016 and by 5% already this year since 2016. We think there is more to come this year. A lot of time and resources are involved in those net increases. We also recognise that we lose people all the time because lots of other people want to hire our staff. If one looks at our website and human resources, one will see the effort we make and the videos we put out. We are doing a good job of recruiting within the framework of being a public service organisation.