Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

From a departmental point of view, we pride ourselves on engaging in a constant process of improvement. I talked about the aspiration to excellence in the Department.

In fact, since I took over as Secretary General, one of the things I did was to say very specifically that our two big operational areas - our payments and control systems and our animal health and food safety issue - should aspire to operational excellence, as I call it. I define that as being the best in the EU. We operate in a part of the world with the highest standards in this area so if we are the best in the EU we are probably the best in the world. We think we have done that. We think the SIU has contributed enormously to that but I am never going to say it has never made a mistake.