Mr. Bernard Gloster:

To be fair, I have a very good relationship with the PHA and with the individual private hospital CEOs. All of my team have. I would not want to get into being pejorative. There is a role for the private sector and it is a feature of lots of parts of health and social care. I have a job to do as well and my job is to act in the public interest. Public interest does not mean providing a service at any cost. I do have to have some opportunity to control that and get into some predictability. The point that is at issue in the public domain is if we just picked up the phone last week and asked the private hospitals for a couple of beds. We did not. We have moved on to a very planned position. It is just not the planned position the private hospitals would like and I am not in a position to consider what they would like until next February.