Professor Tom Collins:

We only received the EY report in January. We have had two board meetings since January. The EY report outlines 11 action areas and gives a period of one year where they expect to be moving on all of them. What we have done is taken on board two of the recommendations explicitly.

One is that a subgroup be established to oversee the implementation of all 11 recommendations. We have done that. The second is that we work on a strategic plan. We have put in place a steering group to start this process. We have begun working on the report. It will be the template for the board's priorities for the next 12 months.

One other thing we have done in the context of ongoing issues is that we have also established a new audit and risk committee. I am very conscious of the scale of this organisation. The Deputy asked about numbers. There are 320 or 330 staff. I am open to correction regarding the precise figure - in the context of it being a few more or less - but it is in that range. The post of head of HR is vacant. It is extremely important that this post is filled to enable us to get a better fix on the numbers and on the deployment of staff. This is probably a better way too of addressing the Deputy's question regarding the use of agency and contract staff. A study done some years ago involving Mazars estimated a full staff requirement of up to 500. We must look at that study again. We will do so now in the specific context of the new strategic plan.

As stated, we have established the new audit and risk committee to try to get a fix on the many risks that an organisation as disparate and involved in so many types of activities as this can encounter. The other thing we have specifically asked this committee to do is provide a report on the recent WRC hearing concerning the dismissal of a staff member. The WRC essentially found against IFI at that hearing. We want to understand what needs to be learned from that experience. We are into a process immediately of trying to learn and trying to fix things, without perhaps rushing to judgment, as I mentioned at the outset.

The point the Deputy made in his final observation is greatly important. I refer to co-operation between agencies regarding all environmental matters, including, as he said, flooding. From an IFI perspective, at any rate, a huge opportunity is being lost in not building close relationships with cognate organisations. I mentioned some of them in the opening statement. The most obvious ones are the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the EPA, which is clearly an extremely important player, and the local authorities, in terms of their water monitoring people and the local authority waters programme office, LAWPRO. All these are relevant bodies and actors working in the field. IFI should not be isolated from them; it should instead be looking at developing synergies with them. IFI should also be looking at finding agreed modes between all of them to address the challenges the Deputy referred to relating to flooding and other kinds of environmental challenges arising from climate change.

It is complex, but the complexity is better addressed if we are all talking to one another and all seeing whether we can find solutions that work for each interest. Flooding is where it all comes home.