Mr. Giles O'Neill:

Certainly. On the Ready for Customs grant, the Senator may have heard these numbers before, but last year we were communicating hard in saying that the number of customs declarations was going to increase from 1.6 million annually to 20 million. This meant, on a simple calculation, that in respect of customs clearance capacity, the industry needed to employ an additional 2,000 people, which figures the Senator may have also heard. I looked this morning at the number of additional people that we have supported so far, which is 705, with approved and ratified grants to go into the sector.

To be clear, the people best positioned to do this work are often involved in freight logistics and customs clearance because they are the closest people to it and have the data that is required. Not every company needs to take on somebody to do this. Many of these companies gave this work out to a third-party, which is the right thing to do and makes commercial sense.

The Senator mentioned the Brexit Readiness Checker and made a connection between the Ready for Customs grant. Yes, some of the companies that would have used the checker would have taken advantage of the grant but many would not have. The Brexit Readiness Checker was designed and devised to enable companies to look across their business in a number of different areas to see if they were ready or not, to provide a gap analysis and a direction towards supports. There is not an intrinsic link between those two products. I hope that answers the Senator’s question.