Mr. Barry Lowry:

That is correct. It is difficult to guesstimate the volume of traffic for any call centre. As the Minister of State said, we have been using data from the first day. On the first day, we got 4,000 calls. Interestingly enough, a large proportion of those stopped after they listened through the interactive voice response, IVR. It is our hope that is because the IVR gave them the information they wanted, rather than that they got fed up waiting. The service has ramped up again today. We plan that next week the call centre will operate in the region of 60 to 80 staff. We have built a scale up procedure if we need it.

Many of these things grow in intelligence as they go along. To date, a spreadsheet has been sent round to everybody who plays a part in this. It contains as many questions as people could think of. They have been answered and scripted. Obviously, there will be questions that nobody has thought of. In those cases, they will be dealt with and then scripted. We are looking at how we can create extra processes. For example, if a person changed his or her email address, but it is clear from the data it is he or she who has called the centre, we can automatically issue that digital Covid certificate. In other cases, there will be substantial changes. In these cases, it has to go through the proper resolver team to quality check the data. This will make sure that we are giving the certificate the person who actually had the vaccination.