Mr. Philip Carroll:

Unquestionably, what the Chairman said is true. When we consider the number of investigations carried out annually, in the grand scheme of things very few involve difficulties. As I said, over the past five years we have had 66 cases for prosecution, which is not a large number. In the context of the work of the investigations division, on average there are, I understand, 130 or 140 separate investigations. Many of them do not go beyond the point of a warning for somebody who has perhaps inadvertently done something wrong.

There is no imputation on farmers generally. They are generally completely compliant with all of the legislation they have an obligation to be compliant with. There might be 140 cases a year, and over five years only 66 went to prosecution.

We have a huge compliance level. I do not know how one defines it in percentage terms but it is over 99%. There is no imputation there. I felt it was important to call out the fact that this is a difficult unit to identify required skillsets for because one is looking for people with a legal understanding and a capacity to investigate, record information and to present that information in a form that is amenable to prosecution. It is hard to get such a skillset. I also wanted to bring to the committee's attention the fact that this is difficult for them to do as well and, therefore, how difficult it is for us to man that team. That was the only context in which I was making that point.