Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

On numerous occasions, we have reported on the difficulty within the health service and the incidence of non-competitive procurement of services. Basically, a contract is put in place, perhaps for three years, and then it rolls and rolls, such that we are finding there are some contracts under which there could be six, eight or ten years of purchasing from the same supplier.

This blocks out other potential bidders to do the work. We have reported on this on numerous occasions. We always test to see if there is evidence of improvement. For a number of years, we have had a sample basis with this level of non-competitive procurement.