Dr. Richard Browne:

I thank Deputy Berry for the questions. I will begin with the changes in the NCSC. Many of those changes, while they have become very obvious in the last 12 months, owe their origins to deeper processes that go back to the 2019 strategy, in many ways. If we look at the capacity review that was conducted in 2021, much of the structure and staffing roadmap was created in that process. The figure of 70 came out of that and we hope to substantially surpass that figure next year. That is the longer-term process. This was a structured, coherent process, building on a series of reports going back to 2009 when the original report that led to the creation of the NCSC was drafted. It might look dramatic but it is really the realisation of something that has been happening for a very long time.

Regarding staffing, we have had significant success in recruitment. In many ways, we have been the victim of our own success. The Deputy may have heard this from his own contacts, many people who have tried to get in have been frustrated at the length of time processes take. First of all, that has changed because we have managed to accelerate the process quite a bit. One of the real challenges we have is that we have so many people applying that interviewing people takes weeks. To run through a full recruitment process for a CSS grade, for example, takes many weeks. I will give a case in point. We closed a new recruitment competition last week. Previously, we thought that 90 applicants would have been a good haul for a CSS competition. That was the figure the previous year. It has very substantially surpassed 90 this time around. We are going to have to trawl through and interview a significant proportion of that much larger figure. That means the process will take longer but it also means, as we have seen throughout this process, that we are getting really good staff out of it.