Ms Louise Byrne:

This matter was raised at our stakeholder consultative committee meetings and we have asked our stakeholders to provide an estimate of the likely IT costs, whenever that information is available. They could not provide that until they were in a position where they had what is known as the application programme interface, which is the tool that will allow merchants to connect their IT systems to our national fertiliser database. Separately, we have been engaging with officials in other Departments and agencies about what supports may be available. We have asked for detailed submissions on what those likely costs will be. There is a cost, and we acknowledge that, but the cost depends very much on the systems.