Hello and welcome to our latest Beyond Brexit podcast. I'm Emily Kahn. With the business focus ever stronger on preparations for the risk of no deal, today we'll be looking at how organisations in different sectors are preparing for Brexit. To help me do that, I'm joined by Kerahafee, UK leader of manufacturing and automotive, Lisa Hooker, consumer markets

leader and Jules Kirby, who's leading much of our Brexit work in the farmer and life sciences

sector. Thank you all for joining me. Jules, as a regulated industry, pharmaceuticals are

often talked about as being one of the sectors most advanced in their preps, so I'd like to come

to you first,

if I may. What sort of things are you hearing from your clients at this point in the process?

Well, you're right. Pharmaceutical industry is very heavily regulated and there are long lead times in production quite often for the products. So we saw our clients move quite early

to hedge risk in their operating model,

making sure they had the licenses in place within the EU, moving some roles,

and in some cases changing their operating models.

So they've made a lot of changes already.

That said, no deal wasn't necessarily seen as the most likely scenario.

So we're seeing focus again on that, a lot of the contingency planning around supply chain and so on and deeper analysis.

And we're seeing engagement, so more engagement with both customers and suppliers and seeing how they can work together to plan for all eventualities.

And we're also seeing a focus on lobbying.

So there was a bit of disappointment in the industry that Farmer didn't achieve a higher profile in the political declaration.

So we know that Fararma companies are very,

pharma and life science companies are very active in terms of talking to the industry associations

and working with government to make sure they're represented in the future deal.

Okay. So against that backdrop of general readiness,

and I definitely recognise what you've just said there,

what does that mean that you're advising clients to focus on at this point,

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