Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

The Deputy mentioned a very large figure in that regard. I do not want to give the expectation that that amount of money would be saved but there are savings to be made.

There is also an issue of procurement compliance. There are contracts which are not any more compliant but are still delivering value. Let me give members more information. In terms of frameworks, which go alongside the contracts between the Department of Health and the Office of Government Procurement, OGP, we have 202 frameworks in place compared with having 97 at the end of 2015. We are showing year on year progress. Between those contracts and the frameworks, we have €1.56 billion in procurement spend covered by either contracts or frameworks. In 2017, we estimated that we had saved about €21.6 million purely from price savings on our contracts. There is a significant process of work on the way to assist our locations to become more compliant, to look at local contracts and some of them can actually be registered as national contracts.

I will now deal with the sample and as we said this time last year, it is a sample so whether the results are good or bad we cannot say it applies to the whole HSE. Last year's sample had a 48% non-compliance rate whereas this year, the non-compliance rate is 36%. While we would not argue with the Comptroller and Auditor General, there is one contract of a particular type for medical services which we are very satisfied is delivering value and it is about another 5%. We would not rely on the samples year to year to say it is definitely improving but it provides some evidence of improvement and the figures I gave earlier provide more evidence.