Mr. Eamonn Crowley:

We have not let staff go in our call centre, but the call centre is a natural stepping stone for staff into the wider bank. It is something of a route for staff given that working in a call centre is quite a challenging job and they are very well educated in system processes and dealing with customers. As a result, they lend themselves to promotion or movement into the branch network and other parts of the bank such as fraud and issues of that nature. That has been a feature of the call centre staff.

We have increased our headcount numbers in the call centre. Within the 450 staff moving over, there is no element of call centre staff because they support the retail banking network and the current account customers, who, unfortunately, are not coming to us. It is the mortgage customers who are moving to us. The current account customers do not fit into the TUPE definition, from that perspective.