Mr. Bernard Gloster:

There are three levels of response. There is the HIQA response. It has the power to regulate, including to essentially take the livelihood of a nursing home provider away by removing their registration. That is probably the greatest penalty and the one you would least like to see happen. There are also some regulatory breaches of the legislation that might attract fines. That is in the regulatory space. The next space in which the State intervenes is that the national treatment purchase fund sets the rate for private nursing homes, at which the HSE pays the fair deal rate. We pay that rate. There are no financial penalty clauses in that. We pay the rate for the time the resident is there. When the resident is no longer there, we do not pay the rate. The third plank is that we buy capacity from nursing homes for short-stay beds, step-down beds, quasi-rehab beds or other things. Where a quality issue emerges, or we have a safety indicator concern we withdraw that business from the nursing home. Depending on the scale of the concern that tells us the time in which we can withdraw it. It is financial in terms of no longer doing business as opposed to a financial penalty retrospectively for an event. The State does not have power beyond that.