Ms Clare Dunne:

Deputy Troy also mentioned processing times and asked whether they would be covered by the legislation. That level of detail will not be included in the legislation. We are, however, acutely aware that processing times are not what we would like them to be and that they do not align with our own customer service commitments. They are, however, decreasing because of the additional resources we are getting and the changes we are making to how we do things. People are on overtime. Trusted partner permits are currently being processed within three weeks, which is good. The general employment permits are being processed within nine weeks, which is quicker than it has been for some time. The difficulties exist because the demand for permits has increased exponentially in recent years. The answer is not to keep throwing resources at processors. Over the medium term, we are looking at developing an IT solution that will provide a digital end-to-end system. We are trying to take people out of the day-to-day processing and to reduce the number just keying in details. We want to move towards a digitised system. That should speed up the process. We are coming to the end of the first phase of that process, which started with a business process re-engineering exercise. That is almost finished. Already, without introducing any IT system, that process has shown us improvements that can be made to the current system which will help us to process applications more quickly. As I have said, the processing times are currently at three weeks and nine weeks. We are constantly working to reduce those times.