Mr. Brendan Walsh:

Today we have sanction for 200 driver testers. That is what we need to recover the service and keep it where it needs to be. We had a sanction, submitted to the Department in June last year, that was granted to us in September. Before that we had identified to this committee in October 2022 a need for what we believed at the time to be 170 driving testers. What we agreed at the time with the Department was that we would run a competition for temporary testers. We had sanction for up to 75 testers but we only actually managed to secure 41 because they were temporary roles. As a result, we ran into a situation where those individuals were operating in the service.