Mr. Bill Callanan:

Since the introduction of the sustainable use directive, we have introduced requirements in terms of sprayers, certification by farmers, registration of distributors and whether they are professional or amateur, and registration of users as professional users. Bodies like the local authorities must have a professional user who is trained in terms of the application. Consequently, they have a standard with which they must comply. When we do checks, it is based on a risk assessment type model where we do not check everybody - we just cannot - but we do a check of a percentage. There is a requirement on the professional user to have a standard of record-keeping that we will then assess at inspections. I will ask Ms Dillon to talk about our inspection regime in this regard.

As I said, we have done 45 local authorities over the past ten years, so we are looking at about five a year. Every single local authority that uses it is required to maintain these records and have the appropriate systems in place, aligned with the guidance we have provided to it . As with any professional user, we assume compliance and we do a percentage check to validate and verify that.