Dr. Stuart Mathieson:

I echo the praise for the good work done at InterTradeIreland before I joined. Regarding the statistics and how they are available, there are three main sources. The Central Statistics Office, CSO, here, the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, NISRA, and His Majesty's Revenue & Customs, HMRC, in Britain have been recording those. One issue is the timeliness of data. We mentioned in the opening statements that services data, in particular, runs on a lag. For methodological reasons, the CSO does not collect services data in the same way as NISRA, so they are not directly comparable, in that sense. This means we can only talk about services generally on a one-year to two-year lag. The most recent figures were for 2022 and were published in December. We monitor constantly from all agencies. We have an excellent project manager, Thomas Bell, who is a fantastic economist and lives and breathes everything trade-related. We are certainly keeping an eye on it. We would welcome any engagement from the agencies on what we can do better and what we can do more of. That would be a priority for us to focus on.

For our own part, as well as monitoring what other agencies do, we commission our own research projects into where those gaps and opportunities may be. At the moment, we are undertaking a research project into the business support ecosystem across the island so that we can understand how the ecosystem feeds into the challenges and supports the businesses need on issues like productivity and the part we can play in providing them with the relevant information they need to grow.