Mr. Kevin McCarthy:

We may have entered contracts in the early stages of this that did not represent value for money. In renewing those contracts we would have renegotiated in line with our standard rate card. Absolutely. I perhaps misunderstood where the question was coming from. There would absolutely be instances where in renewing the contract we insisted on adherence to a rate card that had not originally been adhered to in the teeth of the initial emergency crisis.

Part of that was down to our desperation in the early days to procure a bed-----