Thank you for the comments and the questions. I'll again try to deal with all of them.

On council spend, I've given an undertaking, following discussions with ministerial colleagues, to both councils, Pembrokeshire and the Isle of Anglesey County Council, that the cost for recruitment that they were undertaking would be covered. A handful of job offers have been made on Ynys Môn, and so we'll make sure that those costs aren't passed on to council tax payers. Recruitment will be paused given the new choice that's been made. If the import controls aren't coming in, it's difficult to justify then going ahead and recruiting. So, again, that's a bigger problem for DEFRA in England, where they have recruited substantially more people. It's also a challenge for HMRC, given the people they had previously recruited and have been redeployed as well.

When it comes to the challenges around exporting businesses, not just farming but a range of others where you do know that it is not a level playing field, it's one thing to tolerate that for a period of time, and to now have it extended for nearly two years it's very easy to understand why people are upset. And, indeed, port organisations in England in particular that have spent lots of their own money, not just public money, on getting ready for checks are now unhappy that they've spent that money and that may well be passed on to people using those port facilities as well.

When we think about the way that trade flows across the island of Ireland, from Wales and across the land bridge and into continental Europe, you can see that this is a consequence that goes beyond Wales as well. That also, though, highlights the points that you make about biosecurity, about the fact that once plants and livestock are in the UK, regardless of where they have come from, they will likely travel to other parts too. Goats that may come in from continental Europe won't necessarily stay in the south-east of England. So, that's why the destination checks are a real issue.

And there's a cost point here as well. There's the point about biosecurity and about whether it is more sensible to undertake those checks at the point of import rather than at destination. I've already indicated to Paul Davies that my understanding is that about 5 per cent of those are checked at destination, so it's a sample, not every single one. It's also much more expensive to run that system as well because you need more vets going around, and greater inconvenience to go around and check at point of destination rather than being able to do that in a way that would be easier to manage for port authorities at one particular place. There's also, of course, the very practical reason that we don't have a surplus of vets. So, having enough vets to actually staff the system properly—. And I do know a thing or two about veterinary medicine, given that my father was a vet for a long period of time as well. So, I understand there's a very practical issue here about running a system effectively to deal with biosecurity and then having the people to do it effectively as well.

Now, those are all issues that I've discussed with Lesley Griffiths and with our chief vet, and we've given a steer that we want chief vets to have a conversation to try to give us some form of understanding about what a next-level risk-based system would look like—the best system possible given where we are. But, actually, our bigger concern is about the future of technology in this. My understanding is that livestock is notoriously uncooperative when it comes to answering questions about whether it's got an infectious disease. So, actually, you're going to need to undertake some form of physical check. I've yet to see in any credible way how you could have technology assessing the risk of animals, of live animals or plants coming into the country, to assess the biosecurity risk. So, it's possible that you can use technology for some of what's required, but I don't think it's going to be the complete answer.