Ms Helen Martin:

With regard to the number of staff, we do not have enough staff and the complement should be about 53. However, as the Deputy rightly pointed out, we have achieved an enormous amount, although that has been on the back of the real commitment of staff and focusing our resources on where we think we can have the greatest impact. That would be in terms of supporting charities but also, at the same time, since 2016, building up our concerns unit. In future, when we have more staff, we will look to move into the area of more proactive monitoring, and I will come back to that later as there are certain things we require in that regard.

We have managed to get staff over the past year, having lost some staff. We have a new in-house finance manager, which we did not have before as we previously used a consultant. I wanted to bring that role in-house so that person would be reporting to me, as CEO. We have also got our head of communications and stakeholder engagement, which is another key position we have filled since June of this year. In addition, we have a number of positions that are obviously key and which we absolutely need to fill, such as the corporate affairs manager, and we also need more legal resources. On the legal resources, it is a very challenging marketplace out there but we are using the different avenues available to us and working with the Department on that in regard to seeking expressions of interest for secondment of people from within the civil and public service and drawing down from past panels that are available to us. That is very much the focus at the moment. Another key position was filled in recent weeks when Thomas Mulholland joined us as our head of compliance and enforcement.