Mr. Martin Robinson:

On dealing with the assembly being down, we can look at that from the perspective of businesses as well as our own perspective. I mentioned our research. It demonstrates that businesses are resilient and focus on what they need to do to grow. They get their heads down and get on with things. We very much notice that. The best evidence of that is the cross-Border trade figures. In spite of there being no assembly, trade has continued to grow year on year and go from strength to strength. It is now at its highest level ever. We saw growth in 2022, North to South and South to North, of 30%, which is really encouraging.

As regards our organisation, we have continued to deliver across these years against our remit of supporting businesses on the island and driving growth. Businesses continue to seek our reports, which speaks in some way to the second question. We are continuing to work closely with businesses, and to change and pivot our supports and respond to their needs. With the assembly being down and the North-South Ministerial Council not operating, we acknowledge that the council plays a key role for cross-Border bodies in providing policy direction and as a forum for both jurisdictions in matters of mutual interest. However, we have worked throughout all this time very closely with both sponsor Departments, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the Department for the Economy, which provide great support for our work, as well as close collaboration and direction to ensure that we continue to make a positive contribution to policy priorities North and South. From a governance perspective, the absence of a North-South Ministerial Council has had an impact in terms of our ability to recruit new board members and make changes to current headcount levels.

On the question about businesses' awareness of what we do and participate in, we have been very encouraged by the level of demand for the products and services we offer and the level of uptake from businesses right across the island - every county on the island is involved - and that remains strong. We can talk about specific programmes in due course. There is strong demand for the programmes we offer. We do a lot of promotion of the programmes, events and activities we run and the support we provide. We work closely with a number of Departments, stakeholders and regional partners who help to promote the programmes and encourage businesses to take advantage of the opportunities. That has been very encouraging.

Obviously, Brexit provided some uncertainty for businesses, which was not helpful, but we are very proud of the response we made in terms of pivoting our supports and providing at that time what was a sort of Brexit advisory service. Through that, more than 60,000 users benefited from the free and impartial advice we provided and 4,000 businesses took advantage of a Brexit voucher that we brought out at the time to enable them to access expert advice on moving goods under the new rules, and that was really successful. Over that time, we have adapted those vouchers.

Most recently, and this is an important development, we launched a new cross-Border trade hub, which is an online knowledge hub for trade in goods and services. Through that, we are trying to provide up-to-date advice, information and guidance to businesses in terms of some of the implications of some of the changes that are happening and deal with their queries in areas such as customs, VAT regulation and cross-Border employment.

To finish, in response to Mr. Molloy's question, through our all-island business monitor, we ask businesses questions each quarter with regard to Brexit and its impact. Over time, we have seen that decline from a peak back when it was there to businesses largely now telling us that they have adapted. More than half of cross-Border exporters tell us that they have adapted almost in full to the changes under the new regulations, and we have seen it diminish as one of the key issues in our survey over that time. Again, it testifies that businesses typically make the changes they need to get on with things and seek the clarity where they need it, but really drive business opportunities where they can.