Mr. Bernard Gloster:

On the private hospitals, I want to be careful because we are just at the commencement of a particular process within the procurement framework to deal with that. I do not accept the position that we are too late in engaging with them. When I first appeared before the committee when I arrived here in March, I made it clear that if we were going to utilise private capacity, we needed to make a firm decision on it and we needed to proceed to agree it. I met with representatives of the Private Hospitals Association. A number of my officials have met with them several times. The Secretary General and I finalised two positions this year. The first is that we were using an average of 160 beds a day from the private hospital sector since the end of the crisis or pressures of last February and we agreed to continue that until next February. We have also now issuing a framework to the Private Hospitals Association, on which it had a pre-procurement briefing last week, for the additional surge capacity for the period November to February, inclusive. We have committed to reviewing the efficacy and appropriateness of all of those beds and what impact they are having on our system at the end of February next year. On that basis, we can make a decision about a longer-term future or not, depending on what we need. I do not simply accept that we turned up last week, picked up the phone and asked them for beds. We are spending serious millions of euro every quarter on private beds and we are going to a framework to protect the public interest in it.