Yes: a fairly significant amount of work had to take place in the run-up to the TCA being agreed, as has been the case since 1 January. There has been a lot of work on deficiency fixing in transposing EU law into domestic legislation. That has been a mammoth task, spanning a number of policy and operational areas.
As I mentioned earlier, there are 86 powers that we need to assess and work through, but we hope not to have to rely on them in the longer term. About 500 obligations have also been transferred across from the European Commission or member states, which vary in complexity. Although we might already be undertaking some of the obligations—such as licensing—others will be substantially new with regard to how we do things.
There have been significant implications for resourcing our teams. You picked up on the issues relating to trade. Given that we are the starting point of the supply chain, there have been significant impacts on our operational teams, which have had to fill a gap in education and in supporting guidance. We have had to help people understand the changes to processes and the conditions that are now in place that allow EU vessels to operate in Scottish waters and that allow our vessels to operate in EU waters, including what it means to export products from Scotland to the EU, whether via Northern Ireland or elsewhere.
A significant amount of works needs to be done at pace to license EU vessels to allow them to work in Scottish waters, and the verification of UK vessels that are operating in EU waters had to be done for the first time. There are benefits to that—there is a level playing field; we are all working to the same conditions on licences—but it has been very new for the vessels that are operating.
We have also seen an increased need for controls and administration in relation to matters such as port state control, which has had a significant impact on the workload of our fisheries monitoring centre, which handles that, and on the time that it takes to deal with and provide those authorisations. There has also been a significant amount of reworking of applications, which has involved a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.
As you rightly highlighted, there has been an impact on our business due to seafood trades and the impact of the TCA on our ability to trade quickly and easily, and we have had to redeploy staff to provide support in that area. We have also had to support the administration of the seafood producers resilience fund to support the businesses that have been affected during the early period.
The impact has mainly been in relation to providing support and education, getting our heads around what it means for us as the authoriser and understanding the knock-on effects on other aspects of our work. In Marine Scotland, we have the benefit of being core Scottish Government, so we are close to some of the other groups to which things that are happening; we also have the policy and scientists sitting alongside us as the regulating body.
There have been significant increases in workload as we all try to understand what is going on. It is still early days.