Mr. Colin McGrath:

There are structures but I am not as convinced that those formalised structures are being used as often as they could. Various committees have been established within the hierarchy of the Executive office with which businesses can engage. Some of them have only very recently been populated, however, and some have only met once or twice.

The other side of this is that Northern Ireland is not a big place. Many of those key people who are involved in representative groups, therefore, know exactly how to be able to access the decision makers and are probably utilising that avenue much quicker than the formalised structures. Take, for instance, the key agencies that represent manufacturing, retail and various organisations. I have no doubt that they have Ministers' telephone numbers on speed dial and if they have issues or problems, they are able to get access. I do not believe we should do that to the default of the actual structures that are in place, however. Formally capturing what those issues are means we can start to identify patterns. Then, we can also ensure that there is not some form of preferential treatment, or that certain organisations that get support from particular political parties with particular ministries get quicker access to some sort of resolution to the problems they have. There are structures in place.

We use our quarterly meetings to ask the junior Ministers who sit on those forums. We have been going through a process of asking when they will meet and we are now in a process of asking what issues are being raised. We will continue to do that as part of our engagement with the Ministers within the department. If it were a school report, however, it would ask, "Could do better?" We need to keep putting the pressure on them.