Mr. Bernard Gloster:

There are three important steps to reflect the process. The first was that there was a consideration of what was available in the country or what the health service already had access to. As Mr. Mulvany said, if we were going to take the 2,000 beds in the private sector, they would come with the 48 that were there. The second was an attempt to maximise our number through the approved providers that had already been put in a framework of some type of tendering process. Obviously, we would have had reliability and quality assurance regarding what was available from them. Throughout that very tight period in March, the scale of the public anxiety right across the world fundamentally changed.