Mr. Liam Woods:

There were a couple of further points. A Deputy asked what health business services, HBS, is. There is a plan within the HSE for health business services, which we can make available to the committee. It is a succinct document that fully explains this. Very briefly, given that we are creating hospital groups and community health organisations, some functions within the HSE that run centrally at the moment need not be distributed and are better and more sensibly run from a shared location. The services within health business services that will provide a service to all of the health environment in the future will include procurement, estates management, financial processing, personnel superannuation and HR services, which includes recruitment. Those services can be provided at one time nationally, without duplicating everywhere. Health business services is the name of the division, which has its own director within the HSE, that has a duty to provide those services across the whole organisation. It allows hospital groups to focus on issues related to planning their future direction, dealing with care issues, and dealing with service provision. There is a wider document and I am happy to make copies of that available to the committee if it is helpful. I think we have covered the query on the internal audit approach.

The last question was what it means to say that additional procurement capacity is required. Mr. Swords may add to this, but briefly, there are a few factors involved. There is an increasing demand for procurement services from the organisation. As compliance has been increasingly driven within the organisation over the last few years, there is greater demand on procurement as a service because people need that service to comply with procurement regulation and to buy goods and services in a way that makes good use of public funds. That is an incoming demand. We have also lost staff through the moratorium and the austerity we have been through, which is a factor. Sometimes we are relying on relatively junior staff to do very significant things, which we have to be alert to and we must ensure we support these staff appropriately. In terms of the split that took place between the Office for Government Procurement and us, we have ceded some staff to the Office for Government Procurement to support it in doing things we previously did. The net effect of all of that is that we need to be watchful that we have sufficient procurement resources within our organisation to support our needs. It may be useful for Mr. Swords to make one or two more remarks.