Mr. Nick Ashmore:

To date, we have not been responsible for the actual underwriting of the loans. That is what we set with the front-line lending partners. That is why we are not able to gather refusal rates. In fact, these lenders are not very good at gathering their own refusals rates. However, they do report them and they report very low refusal rates. We have separate evidence from the credit demand survey which is run by the Department of Finance every six months. That was recently published and it showed a recent rise in refusal rates. We are not in a position to give figures on refusal rates for SBCI supported loans. However, under the new Brexit scheme which we are launching tomorrow, we will have a clear indication because the SMEs will be applying to us before they apply to the finance providers involved. We hope to enhance that level of information going forward. One of the struggles is to actually understand what a refusal is because it can depend. If someone walks into a bank, has a conversation with a bank manager and gets a verbal indication, there will be no paper transactional record of that so it has hard to analyse.