Mr. Jim Meade:

It is challenging. Everybody is fishing in a small pool for staff. I am happy to report we are having reasonable success with our recruitment campaigns. The younger cohorts, in particular, see the green credentials of a company like ours and what we are doing. We do not have a major problem getting staff. It is probably becoming more onerous now to get specialist staff in Mr. Hendrick's area than front-line staff. We have embarked on a campaign for several years now to grow our own staff and to add to the driver cohorts, and we are getting them. We recognised we were going to be bringing a lot of new technology into play over the years to come, so we started an apprentice programme several years ago. We also initiated a women in leadership programme, because the rail industry has been heavily male-dominated for generations. That was the way it was, but we are trying to grow that women in leadership programme. It has grown very successfully. Our intake for the last three or four years has hovered around 20%. We want to get it to at least 25% and 30% over the next several years.

The I Wish foundation will be running a showcase conference shortly and we are now one of the sponsors of that event. I will be speaking at it. Young women from all over the country will be coming on trains to the RDS to showcase promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM, subjects. We will be running special STEM trains and showing them what we do and how we do it. We have our high potential people within the organisation as well. These are people who come in as drivers or customer service personnel, for example, but with high potential to move through the organisation. We have a programme for bringing them on. We also started a graduate programme. This is all about creating the workforce of the future, which is exactly what the Deputy is referring to, and having a supply chain of people coming through, not just at the front line but also at the junior and senior management levels as well, and even all the way up to my position, in respect of who the future CEOs will be.