I understand you don't direct, of course, but my question was about advising. You're overseeing, or monitoring—or whatever you like to describe the role as—quite a number of institutions, and presumably you therefore have particular expertise within your organisation, and I just wondered whether higher education institutions are doing enough to draw on that.
I think we can advise—we can advise based on data and information that we can see. We can advise based on our judgment. The big thing in this whole Brexit scenario is the uncertainty and the extent to which our speculation is better informed than the governing bodies or the sector collectively is probably the issue.
I think that's right. So, there's a relationship with the sector and there's a relationship with individual institutions, and they are different. So, we have engagement collectively with the sector. Bethan meets with the finance directors, and I meet with the vice-chancellors. We actually have the sector and the funding council together on the Welsh Government's group. So, some of these conversations are happening in various ways, where we're all gaining intelligence about what might be a sensible set of planning assumptions. Then, if we see an institution that is manifestly giving signs of not being sighted on some of these risks, either through their forecast or through other assurance activity, we will challenge. We have an annual cycle, with two points in the year where we reassess the overall risks of individual institutions, and that's based on a whole range of hard data but also a range of soft data. Our links into institutions are many and varied. We have lots of conversations and we take all of that in the round and form an assessment about the financial sustainability of the institutions but also the extent to which we think their governance and management arrangements are properly sighted and facing properly the challenges that they face. In some ways, we say it's not about the challenges they face; it's about how they face the challenges. Our alarm bells really ring when we get the sense that, actually, either an executive or a governing body hasn't really noticed. We're not in that place, I'm really pleased to say. I'm not worried about short-term crisis with any of the institutions. There are medium-term real challenges, both because of Brexit and because of other contextual factors, but at the moment the sector is a managed sector, which is good. It's not always like that, but we're in, I think, a good place at the moment. So, our role is definitely to challenge where we don't think they are making sensible assessments, but it's not to say that their assessment is wrong and ours is right; it's just to have a conversation about, 'Why have you done this and what has informed your thinking?' It's slightly more one step back and slightly more subtle, but it is, as you imply, us using the intelligence we gain from all of those conversations when we talk to individual institutions as well.
Okay. Llyr.