 Good morning and welcome to the 12th meeting of 2021 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. Our first item of business is a decision to take items 4 and 5 in private. Our members content to do that. Our main item of business this morning is the third evidence session offered inquiry into Scotland's supply chains. This inquiry is looking at the short and medium term structural challenges facing Scotland's supply chain and how the challenges and shifts in supply chains are impacting on Scotland's economy. We want to consider how to build future resilience and whether there are opportunities to develop domestic supply chains. Our inquiry is structured around three themes of people, places and product. Today's session is the first in our places session looking at logistics. I thank our panel for attending this morning and welcome Richard Valentine, who is chief executive of British Ports Association. Professor Kieran Fernandez, Professor of Operations Management at Durham Business School. Brian Hepburn, operations manager at DFDS. Maggie Simpson, director general rail freight group. Robert Windsor, who is policy and compliance manager and executive director of the British International Freight Association. As we have five witnesses this morning, can I ask members and witnesses to keep questions and answers as concise as possible? Witnesses would be able to provide supplementary evidence post the meeting, so I would ask you to focus this morning on key points and your answers that are relevant to the committee. I also note that Ms Simpson will have to leave this morning at 10.30, and we will allow time for that to happen. I will start with the first question. I would like to direct the question to Brian Hepburn, and I would be interested in Robert Windsor's views as well. Let me go to Robert first. We understand the supply chain pressures that we are all facing through Covid and the impact that Brexit has had on this area. There are well-known pressures, such as the shortage of HGV drivers and the changes to customs that have been challenging for businesses to introduce. There are press reports at the moment about threats that France will introduce additional measures because of the dispute over fishing, and there are threats from fishermen that will block the Calais port, which adds to the existing pressures that there are. Mr Windsor, can we talk a bit about the current situation that has been faced by British Freight? What are your responses to the concerns that are around the potential conflict that is ahead with France in particular? Yes, we can. The pressure is facing the supply chain or the global nature, and in particular the imbalance in demand and supply in the maritime sector. That is largely because of high levels of demand for products and restocking in America. In the air freight environment, the problem was undoubtedly basically the shutting down of all passenger routes for Covid, and then the reimagining of aircraft main passengers for taking out seats and using them as freighters. They are not easy to use because it is very labour-intensive and has things. Regarding the situation with Europe, Biff's view on this has always been that what happened on 1 January this year was the easy bit, because up to a point we were dealing with export procedures that could be easily applied from our knowledge of the rest of the world. We are dealing with new import procedures and new processes coming in, such as the GBMS system. It is a bit like a jigsaw at the moment. We have all the bits, but we are not quite sure how it is all going to go together. I get a lot of questions from my members on this particular issue. People are looking at this because you have the exporter in Europe, the freight hoarder in Europe, the trucker, the import agent and the importer. We are all trying to work out who does what, when and how, and how the data supply is going to work. We are not a political organisation, but I would say that there is scope for improving what the UK Government has done. We are particularly concerned that, for instance, GBMS, although it has been used for transit, has not had what I would call a live testing environment too much, although it is now working towards that. Regarding the rabries of the phishing dispute, I am sorry, but I would rather not answer that because it is outside my remit and it would be pure speculation. You have helped to set out the context of Covid and the pressures that that put on the sector. You have talked about the changes to our customs relationship with Europe. In terms of Scotland's supply chain, whether it is the shortages that we are seeing on shelves or whether it is the pressure on businesses to receive components, is it a combination of those two factors, or is one the bigger problem in terms of supply delays? I think that it would be dependent upon the market and the order of goods. If you are coming from the far east, I would argue very much that it is the imbalance of the environment by America. I am sorry, but there is an echo. I do not have quite worry about that. Portrait with Europe is EU-related exit issues, and they are very demanding as far as I am concerned. We are dealing with parties since 1992. It was basically a transport operation between us and Europe. Now, it is a straightforward logistics operation that includes regulatory checks. The whole nature of the transaction has changed. I bring in Brian Hepburn. Brian, would you like to talk a bit about the pressures that your businesses face and what you think the main issues are that are creating a challenging environment for our supply chains? If you could comment briefly on how you think we could resolve some of the pressures, what would ease the situation? I am based up in Shetland, so we primarily export an awful lot of fish to the continent. I was going to mention the blockade of the Calais port. That will not really affect us too much. The fishermen can block the port or they want, as long as they leave the train alone. That is primarily the route entry into Europe for everything. That is how we get in there. We have faced the pressures since Covid and Brexit. The well-known pressure on the HGV situation is known, but the extra time that everything takes, all our goods such as the fish and the mussels, are all perishable. They lose their value every day and are delayed to get into market. The market is primarily in mainland Europe. We struggle getting everything down there. Now, we can just about get across the border into Beloyne before we attack a graph on the rules. We are on out of time. As we used to be able to go down to Spain, down to the south of France and all that, that has had a knock-on effect for our exports. We do export an awful lot of stuff. Each one of those trailers of salmon is worth about $110,000, and we ship about between $10,000 and $15,000 a year every day. I will roll it back in again. The nature of the interaction with Europe has become much more straightforward and regulatory. One of the pressures is that people just weren't prepared, they didn't know and they didn't get ready for it. Everybody has a great cloak of ignorance, I suppose, with a lot of smaller customers. A lot of the guys who used to pick things up in Europe would just stop doing it. They have now, because they are a driver's shortage in Britain, been able to do that. They have been able to just make their money in the UK without having to go abroad. It is just because, frankly, the hassle of having to get across the border and back again with goods. We are trying to import things. A lot of the customers are working with, for example, I am trying to export quarry equipment to their public Ireland, important stores from Spain and all those things. The clients routinely do not know what is involved. They are like, can you sort out for us? Can you prepare a commercial invoice? Well, no, they have to get their ERI number, they have to get all those things, and a lot of them just do not have them. They are lying on freight forwarders and everybody is trying to make a pound, so everything just goes up in price as a result. One cost £10, now having to cost £20, because everybody has got their hand in the pot, I suppose. I suppose that what could make it better is education. Everybody has been able to do it better. Everybody is frightened that they are going to hit me a massive tax bill. It is like, when do I pay the VAT? Do I pay the VAT now? Do I pay it later? Do you pay it? Those kinds of questions. That creates just an unnecessary hassle. There is a mystique around it nearly. It is an opportunity to make money, but at the same time, it is a great cost. Again, we have had to employ a huge cold store down in Larkhall that we have a lot of fish at, because it is a good product. We have to employ a lot of vets, get a lot of health certificates, and we did not have that cost in 2020. We do have it now in 2021, and that has to go somewhere. I suppose that when we look at the fishermen, it is not really the thing, but French and Spanish fishermen are still fishing in our waters. We are at a competitive disadvantage where our fish can go back to their port and land it without any kind of tariff, whereas we have to face all this. It is not equal. Mr Hepburn, you talked about exporting, and you mentioned importing. Is the blockages on importing being created more by the bureaucracy of importing, rather than the shortage of the goods? The goods that you are trying to source, you can source. It is just the difficulty for people who are finding the new system challenging. I am sorry, Monica. We have been able to resolve a lot of the shortages in terms of operational logistics. We have become better at that, but the bureaucracy is the problem to us. People are not knowing what they are meant to do, and it is changing again, obviously. I now pass over to Michelle Thomson. First of all, before we get too deeply into the session, I wanted to ask Kieran a couple of questions about his report. It follows on from what we have already started discussing in the form of Brexit. I found your classifications of supply chains very insightful and helpful, so thank you for that. However, each one of those types of supply chains has been affected by Brexit. I know that it is not the focus of your report, but I wondered how you would manage to remove Brexit effects from your analysis altogether. That puzzled me somewhat. Can you help me to understand how that came about? You are absolutely right. What we tried to do was, in the report, try to understand, first of all, what are the types of supply chains we could identify predominantly in Scotland, and the data, as you know, has looked at a fairly large number of predominantly SME-based. What we then try to figure out and say is, if this is how a typical supply chain works, for example, if we look at the efficient supply chain as an example, this would be a characteristic type of supply chain for automated high-volume manufacturing. Then we started doing this, analysing a number of different risk profiles and asked, would this be affected by a number of factors of which one was, you know, is there an effect of Brexit taking place? If so, what is the likely impact it can take place? What are the alternative strategies that this particular type of supply chain is resilient to? Because different types of supply chains are resilient to different types of external forces, some far better than others. One example, which you just heard earlier, was around fishing. For example, in the case of fishing, the supply chain weighs on, for example, uncertainty would be higher because of the perishable products that need to be shipped. Whereas that type of uncertainty would be slightly lower in the case of an automotive supply chain because there are A alternative mechanisms to get the particular product into the marketplace, but also you could source it from different locations. We try to weigh different components to arrive at this high-level score, which allows us to look at different factors, which we could change. Just another couple of questions, which I would prefer, if that is okay, if you email the committee so that we understand the basis of your research. You do not need to answer them just now, but, basically, you mentioned the case study analyses and the features and the weightings of them. I did not quite understand how you arrived at the weightings and, in particular, the methodology, so it was useful to understand that. You also mentioned risk in most academic literature. The risk is defined as a combination of the probability of getting a bad outcome with an assessment of the value of the bad outcome. It is then combined to get a utility score in your report, you depart from that model. I just like to understand your basis of risk, because that feeds back to your earlier comment about the assessment of how you weighted Brexit as an impact on some of the supply chains. Professor Fernandez, if you were able to respond to us by email responses to Michelle's questions, that would be helpful. I will now move on to Gordon MacDonald, followed by Fiona Hyslop. My questions are addressed to Maggie Simpson, predominantly about rail freight. We have talked this morning about the international situation, but I am keen to understand the UK domestic situation in terms of opportunities for growing rail freight. Network Rail had its industry growth plan from April 2019 to March 2024 to try and grow rail freight by 7.5 per cent by March 2024. One of the written submissions that we had suggested that if we accelerate the transfer of freight from road to rail, we could reduce loads from Scotland to England by 900 per day. I am just wondering where we are on trying to grow rail freight in Scotland. I think that the rail freight perspective is different to the comments that have been made by people so far, because as you say, we are looking at the domestic movement of goods to from and within Scotland. All of those axes are important. Across the last two years, our members have worked really hard to make sure that they are doing as much as they can to keep the goods moving up into Scotland and across Scotland. That has included measures such as running longer trains up to half a mile long, putting on extra services and looking at how we can do more at weekends and overnights, where the engineering access on the rail and the network allows that. I am working with customers to try and get new trains up and running. There have been a number of new services across the UK recently. I know that my members are working really hard to try and put on extra services up and down the country, including on those Anglo-Scottish corridors. We are working really hard to try and get modal shift. I think that there has been a sea change in people's understanding and perception of the need to do more by rail and, indeed, water freight for decarbonisation. The great target that you mentioned within that network rail document has been hugely important for us as a sector, not necessarily because I can tell you that we can hit 7.5 per cent or some other number, in fact. Of course, the Covid disruption has affected us as it has everybody else, but what it has done is shifted people's mindsets and behaviours to support the much more supportive framework for freight. I have to say that Network Rail in Scotland lead the pack across the whole of the country in their approach to rail freight, the way they consider it as part of their plans and the way they promote it. We have been citing them as an example of best practice when we have been talking to the other regions south of the border. In terms of doing more, I think that there are a number of things that we are doing as a sector. There are new projects that are set to come on stream in the next year across Scotland, the work at the Moss End terminal, the work at the Highlands Spring terminal, more work on timber being planned. One of the things that we are conscious of in the medium term is the need for that capacity to be there on the key cross-border corridors to the west coast and east coast mainlines. They are very congested routes, with a significant demand for more passenger trains, including High Speed 2 trains, in the fullness of time. The capacity of those axes continues to be a concern for us in the medium term. Environmental issue, can you say what the benefits of moving from road to rail would be in trying to achieve our climate change targets? He also mentioned HS2. There was a media report that said that the big loser in cancellation of the northern part of HS2 was the freight industry. Could you touch upon that as well? Of course. In terms of the environmental performance across the railfront sector as a whole, we make on average a third only of the carbon of road freight. 76 per cent less is the statistics that get quoted a lot. On the Anglos Scottish Corridor, where we are able to run with electric haulage, that percentage would be even higher, probably up to 90 per cent better than using road freight. Even with diesel, we are making significant carbon savings compared to HGVs, so that is something that we are very proud of. The industry is bringing customers to us, but also not to be complacent about. We are looking at measures to try to get that number down, even less. Longer trains are a really good example of that. Every ton of carbon that we save is worth having. Those smaller savings on each single train that we do all add up as well, so we are working really hard to try and reduce it even further. On the eastern leg, I have seen those press reports. It is a really complicated picture for us, and probably in truth we need to do some more analysis about what the impact will be for us. Within that report last week, there was good news and bad news for us. These are matters in England, so I went well on them, but upgrading up to the trans-Pennine axis is really important for ports on the east and west coast of England, and that was good news. Understanding where those HS2 trains will run in the future on the existing network and what that means for the net amount of capacity available is a concern, and we need to do some more work to understand granular detail what it will mean for us. The east coast mainline is already a heavily congested railway. We have seen recent issues with the new timetable, and it is an axis where we will want to grow in the future. I think that there are some concerns about what the impact will be. Thank you very much. The other area that I want to ask a couple of questions on was ferries and the sea alternatives. I addressed the question to Richard Ballantyne to start with the British Ports Association. We have seen, because of the congestion on the roads, increased fuel costs and, of course, HGV drivers, that companies are looking at alternatives, one of which is rail, but I was wondering what the possibilities were of introducing direct ferry routes from Scotland. We have seen the situation in Ireland where, in the last reported numbers, there has been a substantial reduction of traffic to the UK, of 21 per cent reduction in trade to the UK from the container trade and direct trade with the EU is up 36 per cent. I was wondering what the possibility of reintroducing, for instance, a recyde Zeebrooga line or the much-talked-about-possible Norwegian connection if there was a possibility there given the change in circumstances. That was to Richard Ballantyne to start with. Good morning and thank you very much to the committee for the invitation. Just briefly, I will give a bit of context. I think that it is relevant to that particular question. Scotland, like the rest of the UK, is reliant on EU traffic for imports of certain commodities like food, for example, whilst the UK relies on the deep-sea traffic from Asia for finished consumer products, furniture, toys, clothes, many different types of items. As Robert said earlier, the shortages and the pressures that we have seen across the sector vary depending on the nature of that trade and where it is sourced from. The haulier shortage, I have to say, is obviously a pressing matter. It has not quite hit Scotland in exactly the same way as it has done the rest of the UK. In England, for example, the haulage community relied more on European labour and a lot of that labour we saw towards the end of last year relocated partly due to Covid and a lot to do with Brexit relocated back to places like Central Europe, Eastern Europe, etc. However, in Scotland, there tends to be more domestic resource for haulage. However, it is all interlinked. When you see shortages in England, you do see a bit of a run in Scotland. It has not quite hit in the same way, as I understand it. I am sure that the Road Haulage Association, who are very vocal on these matters, would be able to provide the committee with extra advice. When you talk about goods coming into the UK, a lot of it comes in to places like the east coast of England, South England and is predominantly trucked up, although, as Maggie explained, there are some very valuable and useful rail links. It is important to note that we still have some good shipping routes from domestic shipping routes from south to north to south, depending on the commodities. They have tended to focus on heavier balks, things like timber, aggregates and big, heavy commodities that are more cost-efficient and fuel-efficient to transport by coastal ships. However, we are seeing a growth in the transport of containers on feeder vessels. As you rightly identify, there has been growth in other areas around the British Isles, not least from continental Europe to Ireland. The closure of the ferry service from Rezaith to Zivrigo back in about six or seven years ago now was a bit of a dent, I would say, in the Scottish logistics industry's armory. It is a bit of a pity, but markets dictate those things. I understand that there are continued discussions about a potential return of a ferry service, but it has got to add up. I would suggest that my colleague from DFDS would probably be better suited, especially as they were the carrier who used to run the service. He will know about the commercial angles, but I think that there could be, with a bit of extra will and a bit of commercial interest, a role for Scottish ports to link up to continental Europe on a unitised front. However, at the moment, we are so heavily dependent on England that there is a lot of choice on that east coast. Teeside, for example, for the time, has unitised services. Not to mention the southern ports and the Euro tunnel, as we heard earlier. It is never that difficult to drive, unfortunately. Still, despite the increases in fuel, it is still quite cost-effective to get your goods down from Scotland to the south coast of England and get them across. I am using fish as the example, as we heard earlier. If they are landed in north-east of Scotland, Shetland, Northern Isles and West Coast, it is still very efficient to preserve the value and perishable commodity down from those southern ports to places such as Boyloin, as we heard, but also to other markets such as Zybrooga and beyond. It will take quite a dramatic shift and change in operations to see a major shift, but there are opportunities for some modest changes. Brian Whittle, do you want to comment on it? Yes, just quickly, just to thank Richard for opening all that up. It was very much stuff that I understood quite well. We have been looking a lot at things like intermodal freight and multimodal freight, sorry. Where can we go? How can we do it? We looked at rail links down to the south England. From Llyxamawson to Tilbury, for example, and speed of the service is the big barrier there. It is one and a half days, I think, that we were quoted to get the actual product down from Mawson to Tilbury, which is two thirds too long, so we cannot do that. We have to go by road. We are compelled to, otherwise the product starts to have values like I do not know what it would be, at least halved. We have obviously DFTS of freight, ferry operator 2. We did have the Rossite to Zybrooga link for a number of years, and it just failed on numbers. It would be fantastic to have an actual link from Scotland into Europe, but at the moment we are pushing a lot of stuff through Emigham. Emigham has actually opened up a rail freight link between Humber Express, Emigham to Doncaster and so on, so we are looking at that. There is a ferry route going into the south Ireland, because, like you rightly said, the freight there has just boomed from the continent since the freight has decreased to the mainland UK. No, it would be a dearly held ambition if we could get some kind of freight service between Scotland and mainland Europe. If we could also look at how we could explore more multi-modal means of transport with a rail network, basically, so I was trying to say. That was all for me. I am going to allow Jamie Halcro Johnston a short supplement today before throwing a heads up. I might come back to Brian on the questions that were asked there in terms of road transport, but if I can go to Richard Ballantyne, it was just on the point that you were talking about transshipment. For a number of years, there has been talk of, say, a transshipment hub in Orkney and, I am sure, in other places across Scotland. I just wanted to know on that basis, do you think that the infrastructure within Scotland in terms of transshipment, do you think that there is potential for more infrastructure there, for example a transshipment hub somewhere which would give greater options for freight coming in and freight coming out? The proposal in Orkney, I am sure you are familiar with this, was heavily dependent on the opening of the northern sea route round from Asia, sailing through the Arctic, which is a bit of a pity that may now be an option because that is a damning thing on our environmental performance as a globe, but if that route is open, of course, there will be commercial opportunities, particularly during the summer months. Orkney would not have the facilities right now, of course, but to build a transshipment hub would predominantly require port and landside infrastructure around existing hubs, which would be, I would imagine in the Orkneys, probably quite easy to do quickly. There would be a cost implication, of course, and you would probably have one of the big carriers like your Merse or your Hapag Lloyds or others who would want to come in and help to invest in terminal facilities. You could do that relatively quickly, I have to say. Orkney Council that runs the port infrastructure there has got quite an exciting master plan. They have been quite good at sourcing capital for investing in their port infrastructure, more so than many other ports in the UK, I have to say, but it is heavily dependent on markets, and it really does focus on that Asia-Europe traffic, unlike, for example, commodities coming over from mainland Europe, which just wouldn't be sensible. It would be completely out of the way to send them that route. The rest of Scotland has good container facilities, of course, in places like Grangemouth and Clydeport. I think that there is quite good capacity there, but, as ever, it is a market and the ports, even the publicly owned ports across the UK, are self-financing, for the most part, with the exception of some sort of ferry infrastructure for passengers in the Highlands and Western Isles. It has got to be a business case for that. The ports are not typically subsidised by government. They do things on their own, strategically and financially independent, so there has got to be a business case for them to be able to justify quite a large investment. That said, the ports industry has always responded to opportunities, whether that be from freight or other sectors like offshore energy and now offshore renewables. It is possible, but you would probably seek additional evidence from colleagues up in Orkney on the viability and suitability of that. I would like to discuss the financing of improvements to interconnectivity between different modes of transport and supply. I will come to Maggie first. What improvements could you see and would be desirable to improve that interconnectivity with rail freight, air and ports? Do you think that there are any opportunities for generating additional finance into this area, particularly with the net zero drive and more private funding looking for greener opportunities, whether it is in supply chains or other areas? What improvements would you like to see and how do you think that they will be funded? The answer to that is in two parts. One is about the core infrastructure of the country, that is the rail links, which are owned and operated by the Scottish Government or the UK Government south of the border. There are opportunities for the private sector to be an investing partner for network rail, but it is not something that has happened yet. Obviously, there are a number of policy and regulatory hurdles to doing that. My members are looking at what investments they need to make to meet net zero and to increase capacity in those parts of the supply chain that they do control and that is principally about the locomotives and rolling stock and about the terminals. There are good examples of investment from the private sector in all those areas. We have operators ordering new locomotives at the moment. New wagons have been delivered all the way through the pandemic. We have new drivers in training. There are significant investments in terminals, including locations such as Moss End, Daventree and Midlands, which dispatches over a dozen daily trains up to Scotland from there, as well as a huge new expansion going in there, including a big hub for Royal Mail, which ran its first press parcel services trial yesterday. Good private investment is going in. Do we need more than that? Investors need some certainty. For us at the moment, the UK Government has a big programme of rail reform, as you all know, making sure that that leaves great companies feeling sure that they will get a return on that investment through continued use of the network and support from Government on decarbonisation, particularly on more electrification. Scotland is ahead of the rest of the UK with its rolling programme of rail electrification, but we need that to be rolled out to make sure that, if we are investing as a private sector in electric locomotives, it will be able to use them on the network as widely as possible to get that carbon reduction even greater. I welcome to Robert Winsor, but I think that in terms of Robert Winsor, if you can maybe give a perspective on financing to improve interconnectivity between rail and air and ports, what would you like to see happen and what is viable and practical and who should pay for it? It's not really my area of expertise. I deal with regulation in terms of what customs law is and that sort of stuff and what's happening in the wider maritime environment. I actually don't know the answer. We do see it when ports develop, for instance. The ports have to pay money to develop better rail links or upgrade roads and that sort of thing. We are involved in Heathrow expansion down south and one of the things that we are investigating is an improved rail link. That always becomes a problem because there's problems with finding the right path and who's going to pay for it and that sort of thing. I'm afraid that I really can't give you an answer, not my area of expertise. You don't know sometimes a good thing and certainly in politics as well as witnesses and I recognise that you're the policy and compliance manager. Can I maybe come to the British Ports Authority? I was read with interest that you're making the case for transport infrastructure and the British Ports Authority indicated that they thought that the fixed link between Northern Ireland and Great Britain was a redundant and superfluous use of public money and the ports would be able to use it more effectively between 20 billion and 40 billion. What progress have you made in trying to obtain that level of funding from the UK Government if they're no longer going to pursue the Northern Ireland fixed link and where would you like to see investment and perhaps if that wasn't available, where you see investment coming from and is it possible to look at some of that green finance, particularly if the Northwest Passage, for example, did open up and it was limited to hydrogen or green fuels? Is there that kind of thinking in your parameter? I'm very interested in how you want to spend £40 billion that is no longer available for a fixed link. I thank you for that. I'm pleased that the report has landed well, I have to say. It's a little bit of a sensitive area, understands the political connotations of linking Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It has been one that has been around for many times. If you look at a lot of the parties in Northern Ireland quite often, they had proposals and manifestos even for feasibility studies about such infrastructure. For us, there are sufficient sea links to Northern Ireland, so that to us, the funding would be a bit of a waste. Where we like to see funding allocated is to local authorities, to national governments to invest in road and rail infrastructure that connects the ports. As I said earlier, the ports are self-financing in terms of their own infrastructure with occasional exceptions has to be said, but for the most part they're doing that themselves. What they rely on government for is a high-class, suitable transport infrastructure for hinterland links. I have to say that the UK and Scotland have a pretty good network of motorways and trunk roads, notwithstanding the frustrations that we all experience at peak times with congestion etc, but it's quite a good network. What we don't necessarily have is that last mile connection to strategic rail hubs, freight hubs and of course seaports that is always efficient and streamlined. We would suggest it's not quite as glamorous as allocating 20 to 40 billion to one big project, but if you were to share that around the economy and in our regions and our coastal communities particularly, I think it's a real benefit and you drive up efficiencies of ports and you'd make them more competitive and attract more investment from international sources, whether that be for offshore renewables or freight developments. Our view is particularly, I have to say, local authority managed roads, local authority budgets have been squeezed in the last 11 years or so under the particular government for well articulated reasons and the consequence of that is that local authority roads spending has fallen across the UK behind a lot of our competitors. If you compare where we are with, for example, some of the major economies in Europe like France and Germany, we spend far less per head of population on road infrastructure and they do what's where and I think the same. I haven't got any figures but I think the same is the best for rail, particularly for rail freight. Yes, that's our idea on funding of infrastructure. We only have Maggie to half past 10. Can I maybe ask Maggie to bring her back in about that comment about the last mile and the rail connectivity to the ports and also that point about rail hubs and particularly Moss End and what do you think of the next developments and what needs to be done to address the point that Rich has just made? Yes, thank you. Across the whole of the UK having the right rail links into ports is critically important. Most of the major ports or the large ports have rail links in, which is good and there's been a lot of investment infrastructure, including obviously at Grangemas and what we need is to make sure that there's the capacity on the network to provide those extra trains and that's true of trains that come to and from Scotland over the border as well, making sure that we've got the right capacity and sometimes that means that there has to be investment in the rail network to provide that extra capacity. So, as a, for example, and apologies for using an example a long way from home, but the Felix, though, branch lines had some investment allowing up to 10 extra trains a day to come from that port and of course those trains will operate right across the UK, including trains potentially to Scotland and Manchester, the Leeds and so on. So, when we're thinking about supply chains, the investment needs to be where the bottleneck is and that can generate benefits on a very wide scale. We also are working really hard with network rail just to try and make sure that they invest to make our trains more efficient, more customers, which can be about really small things sometimes around allowing longer trains to run and be more efficient on the network, whether that, you know, some very small examples of investment. I think about eight million has just gone into the port of Liverpool branch line two to double track that. So, it isn't always huge amounts of money about unlocking the links. As I said earlier, I think the capacity of the cross-border networks is something that we are nervous about. There are also parts of the Scottish network, particularly heading up toward Aberdeen and in Venice, where capacity is increasingly restricted, and where there has been some work, but there's probably more to do to make sure that we can be as efficient as possible on those axes. Electrification, of course, of those main arteries, can help as well because they enable us to... We seem to have a problem with Maggie's connection at the moment. Do we have other witnesses still available? No, I think we've been suspend the meeting just for a couple of minutes to resolve the technical issues.