Welcome, Home Secretary and Mr Hobbs, to our session on the work of the Home Office. We have a number of questions for you, as you can imagine, but, just so that everyone understands, we have a hard stop due to Prime Minister’s questions, so we really need to focus on our questions and answers. We will be looking at two areas of the work of the Home Office. We know the Home Office is a very broad animal that covers many things, but we are going to look specifically at issues surrounding immigration and asylum, and then we are going to look at policing in the light of the White Paper, and other issues regarding policing. I hope that makes sense. We are going to start with issues around routes to settlement.

Good morning, Home Secretary; thank you very much for taking the time this morning. As you see it, what fundamental problem is your reform of the routes to settlement trying to resolve? What is the core objective?

The reforms for settlement are precipitated by the issues in relation to the scale and pace of recent migration into the country. Between 2021 and 2024, net migration stood at 2.6 million people, which means that around one in every 30 people in this country today arrived in those four years. We have seen particular issues in relation to some types of work visas, in particular the health and care visa for social care workers, where there was an intention to fill a gap of between 6,000 and 40,000 work places but, in fact, 616,000 people arrived. On any measure, the numbers that we have seen in the last few years are unprecedented. There is no other equivalent period where we have seen such a large number of people arrive and such a mismatch between what the expectation was and what has in fact happened. On scale and pace, and the unprecedented nature of what we are seeing, it is something akin to signing up to free movement with the European Union—that is the only other historical comparator you could possibly look at. The other particular feature is the changes to the rules made in 2020 on what would be allowed under the skilled worker route. The changes whereby it was dropped to below RQF level 6 have meant that we have seen a much bigger range of lower-skilled migration as well. In 2021, only 13% of skilled workers were below RQF level 6; by 2024, that had risen to 53%. As I say, on any measure, we have seen huge shifts in the type of legal migration into the country, and they demand a new response, particularly as, without any change to the rules, the people who have arrived are soon due to be applying for settlement, in the next few years, and we expect those numbers to peak. The number of people applying for settlement is something like 1.6 million on our central estimate. The scale and pace, the unprecedented nature of it and the particular element around the lowered requirements for skilled workers demand some fresh answers from the Government.

I am hearing about deterrence more than anything else, and that you hope that the reforms will reduce the net migration numbers. Can you point to any evidence that the reforms will have that impact?

I would not say it is deterrence. There is a particular issue where we have seen migration into the country on a very large scale—much more than was expected—and of a very different nature to what we have had before, both in terms of the skills range and the number of dependants. Something like 50% of the care work numbers are accounted for by the dependants of workers—again, unprecedented numbers that we have not seen before. That demands an answer from us, because without any change, at the point of settlement all those individuals will be able to access social housing and the welfare state. Because of the lower-skilled nature of many of these people in terms of their salary expectations, you can expect that there will be a correlation between those numbers and those who, having achieved settled status, may require assistance from the state, if we do not change the rules. I would not mischaracterise it as deterrence. It is about managing what has been an uncontrolled wave of migration into the country. We have to consider the impact of no changes—if all these people were able to obtain settlement at five years, which is what the current rules would allow.

We have heard quite a lot of evidence from various third sector and local organisations that have argued that the reforms will have a negative impact, particularly on integration and cohesion. Do you accept that extending the length of time will inevitably have an impact on integration?

No, I disagree. If you look at our paper on the new proposals for settlement, the intention is to restore the element of contribution at the heart of the system. I think that our country is full of very tolerant and generous people—we are very open—but I think there is a condition to that, which is about contribution. If people feel that the system is fair and well controlled, that the people who arrive are contributing and that that is demonstrated and rewarded in the system, that unlocks a greater sense of cohesion. So I would disagree. Also, we are talking about people who are coming here to work. It is not unusual for any country in the world to want to change the rules or change the mix of people who are coming in to work. Looking at how we decide how to fill our labour market shortages and placing expectations upon employers that they have to fulfil before they can bring workers here is perfectly legitimate. We want to be able to make sure that, first and foremost, employers try to recruit people from home and that we have a better training and skills offer for workers here before we seek to fill shortages with workers from overseas. It is perfectly fair and legitimate for us to want to have a controlled system, and that does place burdens on employers. You cannot just go off and bring people in from abroad; you have to play by some rules. I think that is fair enough. That is what the changes are designed to do. We are consulting on some of the detail of the proposals, but the thrust of it is to focus on getting a managed, well-controlled system that deals with a particular problem that we have seen over the last few years of lower-skilled workers coming into the country on such a large scale. The totality of it can help us to rebuild the case for a strong migration system that retains public support.

How do you distinguish between earning settlement and simply delaying it? What is the fundamental difference? How do you see contribution working?

We have already announced that we want to go from a baseline five-year qualifying period to 10 years, which we are not consulting on. We have a relatively generous welfare state. Five years is actually quite a short period before people can be permanently settled in the country, with all the benefits that brings. It is therefore right that we extend it. In the range of proposals we have set out, there are some things that could help you to bring the qualifying period down. If you are a particularly high earner, have come on any of the global talent routes or are a higher-band taxpayer, you can earn that period down from 10 years to, potentially, three. But then the reverse is true as well: if you fall upon the state and end up accessing benefits, that can increase your qualifying period. It is about showing that contribution, staying in work, making a contribution to the taxpayer and your good character all count towards earning settled status and the lifelong ability to be in this country. I think it is fair that we set some thresholds and refresh the thresholds we currently have. We should be able to show the public that we are rewarding the behaviours that everybody wants to see, but that if you fall upon the state and end up accessing the welfare state, it will therefore take you longer to earn settlement. At the end of the day this is a system of bringing workers into the country, so it is about managing economic migration. I think it is fair to have an expectation that those people make an economic contribution to the country.

But really that is just rewarding high earners, isn’t it, as opposed to encouraging a contribution?

You are only bringing in workers to benefit your economy, right? Of course you would want to look at earnings in that context; I do not think there is anything wrong with that. Successive Governments have made the argument for wanting this country to be able to attract the brightest and the best. It would be odd if we were not trying to do that. Of course, sometimes we have labour market shortages in areas where the skills levels or earnings capacities are lower, and of course we have the Migration Advisory Committee to advise on that, but it has to be done in a controlled way. Under the previous Government, we saw a very uncontrolled growth in the number of lower-skilled and therefore lower-earning migrants coming to the country.

It would be fair to say that the real increase was in 2022 and 2023. Have you seen any evidence that Ministers had any control of what was happening at that time? Were they conscious and aware of the numbers that were coming in during that 2022-23 period?

I am not, as you will know, able to see the papers of the previous Government, so, being in the building now, it is difficult for me to see exactly what was happening under the previous Administration. I would say that the publicly available numbers showed a big increase. As a constituency Member of Parliament, I was starting to pick up casework in Birmingham Ladywood that related to people who thought they were coming to work in the care sector, but the provider ended up being dodgy, getting shut down and taking all their money, and then they were left with nowhere to go. It was becoming apparent fairly quickly that the big growth was challenging.

Ministers should have seen that. I was a Minister at the Home Office at one point, so I know the controls we had at that time to see who was coming in and what was happening. Ministers ought to have been aware.

It is inconceivable that they wouldn’t have been aware at all. Obviously, it would be for them to explain what exactly they knew and when, but even if you just go by the information that was publicly available, in which you could see the big growths in net migration, I think it became very clear very quickly that there was a different nature to this type of migration in that year in particular.

That makes sense.

Thank you for coming this morning, Home Secretary. Why are high earners more useful citizens than people who are not high earners?

Well, we are talking about a system of economic migration, so I think it would be odd to say that we are not looking at earnings. You are looking for people to come and work, and the intention is that they can support themselves. You are not looking to bring in people who will ultimately require assistance from the welfare state, potentially for the rest of their lives. The point is to be making an economic contribution. Of course, we are in competition with countries around the world for the brightest and best talent. We want to grow our economy; there are big sectors—in the tech world, the development of AI, our health service—where there is global talent to be hunted after, and we want to bring them into this country ahead of others. Forgive me, but I would find it odd if we were not trying to bring the brightest and best into this country, and that of course has a correlation with earnings.

I quite understand that, but the demand for workers in this country is not always for high earners. We have large numbers of people, for instance, working in the care sector, who are not high earners but are nevertheless extremely useful members of society. We need to be able to attract people to come to work in those sectors. That was my point.

Yes, and I understand that, but I repeat that under the previous Government there was an expected market shortage for social care workers of between 6,000 and 40,000. That is quite a big range, which tells you that there is unreliability in the understanding of exactly what the needs of that part of the workforce are. In no world could you say, even if it was 40,000, that you should not respond when, in fact, 616,000 people come. That was never what was envisaged. Half of them are dependants. I think it is right to then ask a question about what that means for the capacity of the welfare state to potentially absorb that number of people.

I absolutely get that. Some changes have already been put in place, and I understand that net migration may be falling to very low levels already. Do you anticipate that, say by the end of this year, we may be in a situation where we have more people leaving the country than arriving?

I would dispute that net migration is at very low levels. It is still really quite high. It has had a big drop from the very large increases that you saw under the previous Administration, but it is still comfortably over 200,000, which is still quite high on any measure. When I first came into Parliament, back in the days of 2010 and onwards, we were talking about migration in the tens of thousands, so I would say it is still pretty high. I am not targeting a particular fall in net migration through the changes. What I am targeting is a better-managed, controlled system that can deal with the particular problem we now have of many hundreds of thousands of people arriving in the country, half of whom are dependants. That change was never planned for or thought about, and now leaves us with a big problem to fix.

Can I drill down on this? Is the issue the numbers that have arrived, or is it the potential scale of the recourse to public funds as a result of the numbers?

The two are related.

Absolutely, but is the policy intention to, by a set of changes, encourage people who may have arrived to now leave, or is it to have the same amount of people—that 800,000 a year you mentioned—staying here, but with much more limited recourse to public funds, given the social housing waiting lists and other issues across the country?

We are consulting on the precise nature of whether to look at changing the rules on settlement and recourse to public funds, which would of course require primary legislation, or whether to simply extend the qualifying period to beyond 10 years for particular cohorts of lower-skilled workers. That is an open question, and we are genuinely consulting on that. The policy intention is to deal with the particular issue that we have seen. As I say, I am not driving at trying to get a particular decrease. Some of those individuals will find work and will be able to make a contribution. We are consulting and setting on the rules about how we measure that contribution and what that buys you on your qualifying period, but if you get to the end of your qualifying period, whatever it might end up being—10 years or maybe a bit longer—and you have made your economic contribution and can fulfil the mandatory requirements, you will obviously be able to attain settlement in the country. I am not trying to prevent anyone from ever getting settlement, but we want to change the rules by which they do that. Of course, there will be some workers who are not able to do that, and then they would not have a basis for remaining in the country either. The thrust of the reforms is not to say that we want a particular cohort or number to go home, but to get some order and management into a system that, I think we can all agree, got out of control.

There is a set of communities that would say, “We never came seeking public funds,” and that decoupling recourse to public funds and settled status—for example, by linking it to citizenship rather than settled status—would be an option that would increase integration and manage the recourse to the public purse. Is that still being considered?

The consultation asks a very open question about whether the way to manage this part of the problem is to change what is available to you once you get settled status, versus just extending the qualifying period. There are pros and cons to both. On that particular question, the consultation is, and I am personally, very open-minded. If you are seeking to change what happens at settled status, there is obviously a knock-on of how you manage that. There are already people who have settled status in our country, and we are not changing anything in relation to those who already have indefinite stay here. There will be some practical questions about which is the better way forward. Settlement brings lifelong rights and, as I say in the consultation and in the paper we published, settlement is a privilege and not a right. In the end, it is a privilege for people who come to our country, rather than our own long-term residents and citizens, so there is a distinction between those two. I think it is right to see it through the lens of privilege rather than a right.

We are going to move on to the specifics of the consultation in a moment, but Chris Murray has a question first.

I can understand your argument about the public cost and the uncontrolled numbers, but I want to ask about your attitude to the immigration system overall. Settlement is a really important step, but it is a prerequisite to citizenship. When someone becomes a citizen of this country they get a letter from you welcoming them to British citizenship. Do you want to be issuing fewer of those letters? Are you agnostic about the number of people who make the journey to citizenship? If you think about the dependants—those kids who came here with their parents as they took jobs in the social care sector—would you encourage those kids to aspire to British citizenship, or are you agnostic on that?

We have questions on children coming up.

So on citizenship generally, Home Secretary.

At the moment, once you are here there are still mandatory requirements to fulfil before you get settlement, but it is much more of an automatic process, I guess. Beyond that, I think it is a year to citizenship after you have settled status. They are quite quick processes actually, but I am not seeking to limit the number on citizenship, as opposed to on settled status. Obviously if you have made your home here, there is no meaningful difference between you as a citizen or as a long-term settled resident of the country, and there are good reasons why people do not want to lose their nationality of origin, as it were. The full benefits of the state do accrue with settlement, as the rules currently stand, so I think that it is worth interrogating the relationship between the two. I am quite open-minded, as we consult and look to make changes in the earned settlement status space, on whether that has knock-on consequences for citizenship. On children, if people want to make this country their home then obviously we want to provide a pathway to do that, but that is why, as part of that system, we want to think about the rules and the contribution that people make. My family lived abroad when I was a child. My dad was a civil engineer so he worked in the middle east for a period, and for six years I was abroad as well, but it would never have occurred to us as a family that we were trying to accrue citizenship elsewhere. In the end, these are quite personal decisions that families make. The state obviously has to set the rules by which everybody has to play, but I do not think that we can get into the hearts and minds of other individuals. In the end, it is parents who bring their children over, and parents who are ultimately responsible for the life choices that their children have to navigate. I would not say that that is the responsibility of the British state.

We are going to move on to the transitional protections.

Home Secretary, you have covered what you think is the purpose of the mandatory minimum economic requirement, but we have heard that that proposal will affect a huge number of people. Regardless of the arguments about high earners and the best and brightest, probably the exact industries where we currently have quite large shortages are those we called essential during the pandemic. Are the Government considering transitional protection for people who are already in the UK who would be affected by this change?

In the consultation, we ask a specific question on transitional arrangements. Obviously, there are going to be knock-on impacts from any of these changes. On the mandatory economic contribution, we are looking at just the threshold for paying national insurance contributions: it is quite low, actually. One of the criticisms in Parliament when I made a statement on these changes was that that threshold might be too low. I think that setting it at the threshold at which you first start making contributions—you are in fact making national insurance contributions at that point—seems fair to me. Obviously there will be some groups that cannot meet that—primarily, I would imagine, in the dependants group. We will consider what, if any, exemptions or additional arrangements we want to make for those people, but we have had something like 130,000 responses to the consultation. I am sure that there is a lot in there about carers, people with disabilities, women who have had to take maternity leave, and others who will not be able to fulfil the mandatory earnings requirement. We are consulting. We will look at all those particular examples and think carefully about what additional arrangements we might make for those people.

Thinking of another group of people who the requirement might affect, would it be fair to apply it to households where one parent is caring for children rather than working?

Again, we have published the consultation. There has been some helpful discussion around whether you look purely at individuals’ earnings or at household income potentially. It is not unusual, in our arrangements, to consider the income of a whole household as opposed to just one or two individuals within it. Again, the consultation is open on that point, and I am pretty sure that we have already had some strong representations on it. It could be that you set a minimum income requirement for one partner, for example, to account for a whole household income system. But as I say, this is a consultation. We are genuinely consulting on these questions, and we have done it this way because we know that there will be knock-on impacts, and we want to consider them properly and carefully.

So there are going to be plans to assess people as households as opposed to as individuals.

No—you shouldn’t take what I have said as a plan. I have said that the consultation is genuinely open on this point, and that we have already had representations making some of these points. We will look at the totality of the responses that we have received before we design the final policy.

At the moment, the Home Office assesses people as individuals. Why do that when people generally plan as households?

The initial proposal is based on individual contribution being the means by which you earn settlement in the country, and that proposal is being consulted on. We are very aware that there will be knock-on consequences for those who, as an individual, cannot meet the test that we are proposing. Again, we have received many representations about the sorts of people who could be affected, and the other means by which we might account for those individuals, to fulfil the policy intention and stay within the parameters that we have set for the new system in order to reward contribution. Within those parameters, we are looking at the consultation responses that we get.

In the evidence we have received from immigrants, we are finding that they have planned their lives around a five-year route. They are selling property in their home countries, turning down other jobs and delaying having children. Do you think it is fair to those people for the terms of their route to settlement to be changed after they have already arrived?

I think what is fair is that a Government and a country should be able to respond to the circumstances that they face. We have two set-piece rule changes every year, usually in April and then in the autumn for immigration rule changes. It is not uncommon for us to change our rules. These are obviously bigger changes, but they are there because they are dealing with a much bigger set of circumstances. The number of migrants coming into the country between 2021 and 2024 was at an unprecedented level. I think that the changes on the skills levels required to come to the country and the numbers of dependants that have arrived demand an answer from the Government. What you are trading off is a set of potential obligations to people who have come to the country, versus your obligations to your citizens and your own long-term residents in the country. There is a choice—and a trade-off—here, and we are trying to find a balanced way through what is a very difficult problem. I think that the proposals that we have put forward are trying to meet that policy intention, but we recognise that these would be big changes that could have some unintended consequences. There might be groups that we were not aware of.

I think what we can take from this is that it is a consultation and you are consulting.

It is a genuine piece of work, and I recognise that big changes are potentially happening. I would say that despite the fact that we are consulting, it is inconceivable that literally nobody who is currently here would be affected by any of these changes, and I think we should be up front about that. Beyond that, we will see what the responses say.

Would people who would qualify for ILR today but could not afford to pay the application fee be affected by the changes? Would the changes apply to them?

The basis on which an application for indefinite leave to remain is assessed is based on the rules at the time that you apply. That has always been the case, and I think that that was upheld in case law—it has been tested in court and been upheld in case law since 2009.

A lot of these questions are coming up because of the anxiety of retrospectivity. This is causing a lot of issues, so the question is: if somebody had the right to apply but could not afford it today, what would happen?

An application is assessed based on the rules that were in force at the point at which the application is made, not what the rules were when the person came to the country.

It is not whether they qualified initially, but when they applied.

Yes, it is when you apply.

So if they cannot afford to do it today, but they can afford to do it afterwards, those would be the rules at that point.

Yes, and that is the point that I am making. It has been assessed on the rules that are enforced at the point of application for many years. That is not a new change; it is not a thing that we have just done that is different. It has been tested in court in the past; there is 2009 case law on this point. It is the rules that are enforced at the point the application is made.

Okay, but to go back to the retrospective nature of this, what advice did you seek when deciding whether to apply the changes retrospectively?

As I have said already, we have had a very large number of people arrive in the country, much more than were expected, in an unprecedented way. It does demand an answer from the Government because, potentially without any changes, a very large number of people—1.6 million, on our central estimate—would become eligible for citizenship in the next few years. By any measure, that is a big new number for a country to absorb.

Yes, definitely—it was more about the advice you sought.

What I have asked for are policy proposals to try to meet the challenge we have. What we set out in the consultation is a new way of thinking about how settlement is earned in this country, how we might reward the behaviours we want to see, and how we add on more time for people if, for example, they end up accessing benefits. It is a system of economic migration, and the proposals we have are trying to meet that challenge.

We need to move on to the impact on children and young people, which we started to address earlier.

We heard yesterday from a number of expert witnesses who spoke to us about issues relating to children and young people. Some of it was pretty upsetting, frankly. The single phrase that I went home with was the idea that there was “state-sponsored unwantedness”, and a feeling that there were hundreds of thousands of children in limbo, who had either been born here or had come here when they were very young, and whose situation was very uncertain. The first question is this: what are the justifications for putting children on different routes to settlement based on considerations completely outside their control?

Well, we have taken out of scope of the consultation those who are in care or who have arrived unaccompanied in the country. There were a set of commitments made in the immigration White Paper by my predecessor, Yvette Cooper, on children who have been here for most of their lives and who only at 18 discover that they do not have status, to try to find a pathway for them. All of those things are unchanged by these new proposals. If we are looking just at the specific proposals in front of us, the first choice to bring children over is of course on the parents, right? With respect, what I would push back on is that if parents who come here to work choose to bring their dependants over, that is a choice made by those individuals. Of course, we are the sort of country that wants to try to do right by people, but I think it is fair, when these numbers are unprecedented and much bigger than we have had for a very long time, to reconsider what benefits you accrue when you come to the country. The consultation asks questions on this. We will have to consider the treatment of children, because obviously we want to move to a system where, mostly, you earn settlement as an individual in your own right. There will be some children who arrive when they are older—16 or 17. After 10 years, the standard qualifying period for their parent, it would be odd if you did not have individual treatment for somebody who is themselves 26 or 27 at the point of application. We will look very carefully at some of those issues and develop proposals to meet that challenge.

If a child came to the UK aged 10 and their parents do not achieve settlement for 15 years, when would the child receive settled status?

That is exactly what we are consulting on. We know that we will need to develop careful pathways to deal with the particular issue of children. We will want to look at those who are older versus those who are younger in this new system. Obviously, the policy is still being designed, and we are very open to what the consultation responses will say.

We heard yesterday that sometimes there are families with several children. We understand that there is a necessity to reapply every two and a half years, and the fees every two and a half years are substantial. We heard of situations where the family could not afford to make the application for all of the children, and they were in a situation where they had to work out for which of the children there should be an application, which seemed to me to be rather unfair on the children. It is a little bit like the two-child benefit issue we were talking about yesterday. If it is right for one of the children in the family, it should be right for all of them.

Again, what I would gently point out is that these are children who have been brought in by their own parents. In a system of economic migration, people are coming to the country to work. It is fair for us to expect that people coming into the country to work are able to support themselves and their families. That is different from the asylum system. They are two very different things. There is a relationship between some parts of our work visa system and the asylum system because of the sheer numbers of people who switch out into the asylum system as soon as their work visa has finished, so there are particular problems there. But there is a distinction between that and a system that is designed to support the economy, where you can and should expect both a contribution and the ability to support yourself and your family if you brought your family over. It is fair for the state to consider that, and I think most of our constituents and citizens would think it is fair enough to say, “You should be able to support your family.” I think having a system of fees is also absolutely fair.

I agree with that, but do you recognise that the scale of the fees is a problem for some of the families?

Again, we have to set fees at a level that is appropriate. It is a privilege, not a right. It would be odd if we had a system of no fees for some people because we have to manage the system properly. There are costs attached to processing these applications. Again, people make choices themselves to come to another country to work. There are always rules that you have to play by and fees that have to be paid. That is a well-understood part of the system.

I believe there is currently a five-year private life route for children and young people who have spent most of their life in the UK. Are you proposing to retain that?

We will protect the position of those who are already here in line with the commitments that were made when we published the immigration White Paper last summer, but separately to that there will obviously need to be a consideration of what is happening under the new system. We will want to make sure that they are all coherent and sit together properly. That is the point of the consultation, but the pre-existing commitments in relation to children we will fulfil and honour.

I think people will find that very reassuring. What did the equality impact assessment identify as specific impacts of the changes proposed for children?

The equality impact assessment is a living document, so the policy is not yet finalised and will change based on the policy choices that are made. It would not be unusual for there to be bigger impacts on some groups than others. The question—and the legal obligation—is whether they are proportionate in order to meet the policy aims. I will look very carefully at what the assessment shows once all of the final policy decisions are made. That is why we are consulting. We will obviously always fulfil our legal obligations here—and I will always fulfil mine. But the key question ultimately will be—to the extent that there are impacts; we can guess that there will be some impacts somewhere—whether they are proportionate to meet the policy aim.

Are you worried that there will be an impact on child poverty?

Again, this a system of economic migration. It is right for the state to expect people who are coming here to work to be able to support themselves and, if they choose to bring their families with them, that they will be able to support their families as well. The system is designed to make sure that people are working and doing what was intended, rather than needing to access the welfare state. As we complete the policy design, we will have a better sense of what the impacts are likely to be, but if you step back for a moment, you have to start by asking, “What are the principles of the system, and why is the system of earning settlement having come here as a worker different from what happens to you when you are in the asylum system?” You are dealing with two completely different cohorts of people. There are lots of alignments between these two separate parts of the migration system, but it is right that a system of economic migration can show that an economic contribution has been made to the country.

We are going to move on to medium-skilled workers and adult social care.

I am hearing in your responses a theme of fairness to the country, and that it is an economic argument. The Government have said that settlement should be earned on the basis of what you contribute to public life. That sense of fairness would sit well with our constituents, but how is the contribution of adult social care workers reflected fairly in the earned settlement proposals?

Well, I think the proposals are fair. They are trying to meet the scale of the challenge. I know we have to get on to other topics, but I will just repeat the unprecedented nature of the numbers we have seen and the huge scale of abuse that occurred in social care. We have had to revoke something like 1,000 sponsor licences in that sector. First, it was right to close that route, which was open to such abuse, as we saw. Secondly, so many more people came than expected. Thirdly, that means there has to be a response. It is about fairness not just to the workers who arrived, but to the communities in which they live, given attendant pressures on social housing, the welfare state more broadly and public services.

My constituents would see the social care workers looking after people with dementia and autism—contributing, as you say—and that ties them into sponsored visas. I mentioned this in a previous session. One of the trade unions brought up the workers. There is still some very bad practice with sponsored visas in social care. If the measures go through as you want, you will have a shortage of workers, and they have contributed, haven’t they? Some of these bad practice agents are saying, “If you don’t like it, leave the country,” after all they have contributed. Do you think that is fair?

I think we’ve had a lot of dodgy providers in this area. That is why we have closed the route and revoked so many sponsor licences. As the rules were changed and we started to look at medium and lower-skilled migrants, it was obvious that those new routes were open to abuse. It is one of the reasons why, going back to Mr Prinsley’s line of questioning, we look at the brightest and the best at the top end of the spectrum for skills levels and income. You don’t tend to see the same kind of abuse. That is the reason for the action we have already taken. The question is what we do about the numbers that are still here. We have obviously tried to support some of the care workers who have, through no fault of their own, been left with providers who are no longer able to sponsor them. We have tried to find them work elsewhere. We have been working closely with the Department of Health and we will obviously carry on doing that. In a way, what you have just said proves the point of why we need a new policy answer for what has happened here. It cannot simply be to absorb everybody, especially when something like 50%, or just over, of those individuals are dependants, which is not a pattern we have seen before.

You mentioned engagement with the Department of Health on the impact of the changes. Will your preference be to increase the pay and conditions or to recruit from overseas? What way do you see this going? Whichever way you go there will be shortages, won’t there?

To the extent that we have shortages in any sector. The Migration Advisory Committee advises on what those should be and we will always take that advice on board. You will know that the Health Secretary has said we will have a fair pay agreement for the care sector by, I believe, 2028. There is a need for us as a society to reckon with the challenges presented by an ageing population and what that demands of social care. The Government will have a commission on that as well. There will be bigger changes for social care more broadly, but the problem I am dealing with is that the previous Administration carried out an assessment of the skills shortage that had to be filled, and we have had many magnitudes more than that.

Between 10 and 100 times the amount, from what you have said.

Exactly. There is no version of this in which you do not have to take some action here now, just because even if you take those assessments at the highest level, which is about 40,000, from 40,000 to 616,000 is a lot.

Specifically on that point, Home Secretary, accepting everything you have said—there has been abuse, and no one would doubt the Home Office’s work on clamping down on that—that would mean there are 40,000 people currently in the country genuinely working as adult social care workers. The ministerial foreword to the social care fair pay agreement says: “Adult social care workers are the unsung heroes of our country…But for too long they have not had the voice and recognition they deserve.” Do you think these proposals recognise those potentially 40,000 people who are working in adult social care?

Yes, I do, because we are talking about moving to a system where we are rewarding contribution. You will know that the questions that are open in the consultation refer to the need for transitional arrangements, potentially, for some groups. We will obviously want to consider all the responses properly, but we are not being fair to workers that are legitimately working and making their contribution in this country if we ignore the many thousands that were unexpected or the dodgy practices in this part of the labour market. It is about striking the right balance, certainly—I agree with that—but the reason we are making these changes is in part to deal with some of the abuse that we have seen. As I say, when the numbers are so out of sync between what was expected and what in fact happened, I do not think it is possible for any Government to not seek to respond to that challenge. On the fairness argument, you also have to consider the needs of people who are already here, particularly when public services are stretched and social housing is very difficult to obtain. Loading further pressure on to the system would not be fair or right.

Adult social care is clearly stretched. How genuinely joined up are you with the Department of Health and Social Care on this? We have had evidence saying that the Government is about to publish an NHS workforce strategy but there is no adult social care strategy planned at all; there is no analysis that can be seen of the adult social care workforce. Again, I acknowledge the need to tackle the abuses, with 600,000 coming in way over the expected amount, but if there are 40,000 people actually working in adult social care that you could presumably assess, how joined up are you on that?

We obviously work closely with the Department of Health. I do not want to speak for the Health Secretary when it comes to his plans around adult social care and what he might wish to say on workforce planning, the proposals for a fair pay agreement and the other changes in that sector, but I think there is a recognition in Government that we obviously do need to move. There have already been some changes on pay and conditions. I am sure that in the future there will be more, but I will, with respect, leave that to the Health Secretary. We have obviously been engaging very directly with the Department of Health on what to do with the workers who have come over and there has been a revocation of licence or the sponsorship has not worked out, to try to find them somewhere else to go. There have been challenges with that. It has not been a straightforward read-across where they have lost one sponsor and we have been able to quickly find them somebody else. But I think that rather proves that there is a problem here in terms of worker availability and shortage to be filled.

To finish off the questions on routes to settlement, Joani Reid will ask about implementation.

The Home Office is infamous for being sclerotic, if we are being kind. How confident are you that the Home Office will be able to implement and administer whatever proposals you finally agree on?

I think that’s the job, in a funny way. Sorry to be quite basic about it, but we are designing a new system, and obviously I have to make sure that the Home Office is capable of delivering it, but it is not unusual for us to have rule changes at least twice a year anyway. They are often technical, and they sometimes require a slight redesign of our systems or further training to make sure that people know exactly what they are doing as they are assessing applications. I do not think it is such a new thing for the Home Office that they will not be able to do it.

So you are confident, then, that the changes can be implemented quickly and that you will not need any investment in or support with any new IT systems. There are proposals for further checks beyond what they do just now.

There has already been lots of digital transformation at the Home Office, with all the attendant traumas and difficulties that that usually entails, but I do not envisage that these changes are going to break the system, as it were. It will be my job to make sure that that is not what is happening. There are some changes that we will probably be able to do more quickly because we have made some of those decisions much earlier on—in fact, even before I came to the Home Office—surrounding the English language requirement. We are not consulting on the basic idea of the qualifying period moving from five years to 10 years. The consultation is designed to look at exactly how that is done for different cohorts and whether we need to think about transitional arrangements or exemptions or a new way of designing the system to deal with some of the issues that will come up as a result of the consultation. Once we have finalised the policy, then we will be able to do the full impact assessments, specifically on equalities, and at that point we will have to design the system to make sure that it can cope with those new changes, but I am confident that that can be done.

I want to move on to the asylum system and pick up the point about the Home Office administering such a huge and complex system. You are introducing really significant reforms to the refugee and asylum system. People will be refugees, but normally, at the point at which they become a refugee, the Home Office does not need to occupy itself with their case as much—it is the process of hearing their case and hearing their appeal that is taking so long and is so difficult now—but you are proposing to do lots more checks even after that point. What impact do you think that will have on these refugees themselves? How confident are you that the Home Office can actually pull that off?

The changes we have announced, which we are working on to finalise the policy design to meet the aims set out in the “Restoring Order and Control” document, recognise that the pattern of who is a refugee today is very different from when the refugee convention was written, signed and ratified. We have seen a shift. It used to be the case that people would just arrive in the first safe country and claim asylum. Today, we know that people move through multiple safe countries before they seek asylum here in Britain, and we know that claims are going down in Europe, but they are going up here in Britain. There is a change in the nature of what we are seeing, which demands a new policy response. That is why we made the decision to make the core protection that somebody gets if they succeed in their claim more temporary in nature. I think that is the right change to make. What we have set out in our proposals is that, in addition to core protection, we will obviously be seeking to make sure that refugees, just like economic migrants, are able to contribute as quickly as possible. That is why we said that we would set up the protection work and study route, which will have different rules, because we want to encourage the behaviour that we think leads to better integration outcomes. I think the totality of that will be fairer for refugees when they are here. It is designed to build on the things that we know encourage integration but also retain public support for having an asylum system at all, which I think is the other part of the social cohesion and integration picture. If you have a system that nobody believes in, it does not matter how good an individual might be. If they are a very diligent refugee doing all the right things, but a community is struggling to accept new arrivals because they have lost faith in the control that the system has, I think that does demand an answer from Government.

I absolutely agree with you that dysfunctionality in the asylum system is what saps public support for refugee protection overall, but I am just curious about your assessment of Home Office operations overall. It does not centre around the asylum process, including decisions and appeals but instead around the idea that we need to have more Home Office officials—a finite resource—checking whether Somalia is still at war or whether LGBT rights in an African country still are what they are, after we have granted those people refugee protection. Is that really the bit that will make the difference in restoring functionality?

I think it is right that we move to a system where refugee status is temporary, rather than permanent. At the moment, once you are deemed to be a refugee and you succeed in your claim, as you say—that’s it. At that point, you have full status here. In fact, until we changed the rules on family reunification, you were actually much more privileged than British citizens, who have to jump through many more hoops of income requirements and so on before they are able to bring family members from abroad into the country. It is important that people don’t think that one type of status is somehow much more privileged than others; I think it is right to put that much more into balance. We do not want people to be in core protection forever. We want people to be able to move into the protection work and study route, and we want them to be working or studying as quickly as possible, so that they are making a contribution. We think that is critical to maintaining public support for the system. Do I think it is right that we assess that countries suddenly become safe, or that a war people had fled is suddenly over and the opposition has won? I think that demands some change, which is why we have put forward the proposals we have.

You have announced the creation of new safe routes, which many people have called for over a very period. Can you tell us what kind of number of people you would like to see coming through on safe routes? What impact, if any at all, will that have on the small boat crossings?

We are very committed to opening up new safe and legal routes. We have obviously set out proposals for specific routes for workers and students, and the third part of that is a new community sponsorship model to be able to bring refugees into the country. We are designing and consulting with people as we speak, and we will work closely with local authorities and other community groups in the policy design. As I have already said in the House, I would anticipate that in the beginning the numbers will be relatively small, because we will want to prove concept with the model, and make sure that the methodology that we have adopted for assessing community impact and a community’s ability to absorb people are all correct, and that we are not loading too much pressure into the system. I envisage the routes becoming more generous over time, but I think that is linked to the ability to deal with the problem of the boats and the wider abuses in the asylum system more generally. I think that public support for safe and legal routes to be more generous will be there as long as people feel that the rest of the system has been brought into balance and under control. I think those two things go hand in hand. So both to win the argument and to ensure that the policy design works, the numbers will be smaller to begin with. I would hope that as the other reforms are rolled out, we will be able to grow these routes and they will become more generous over time. As to the question of whether the creation of safe and legal routes, in and of itself, deals with the issue of the small boats, I think that is less clear. Organised immigration crime is a real thing. Unfortunately, these people are very smart, very entrepreneurial and they don’t struggle to find people to put in a boat, and people seem to find the money to pay them to get on a boat. Will the creation of the safe and legal routes on its own help to deal with the boat crossings? No. Is it part of the picture that is the wider solution to these problems? Yes.

Thank you for that. I would like to move on to now talk about asylum accommodation. This Committee has heard a lot of evidence, which is blood-boiling, of billions of pounds being wasted, in a way that is terrible for communities where hotels pop up and terrible for the asylum seekers themselves—we heard about really serious safeguarding concerns—and, as we all know, that is driving real public unrest. What is your assessment of the asylum contracts that were signed with these three private companies, which have made hundreds of millions of pounds of profit? There is a break clause coming up later this year. What is your view on whether the break clause should be triggered?

I know that these contracts have caused quite some consternation among a number of different parliamentarians, and I know that they are of interest to this Committee. Obviously, I inherited these contracts and we are trying to make the best of them. I think that the actual contract management itself has improved, because we have been able to claw back £74 million in the last few months, which shows that there is just much more rigour in the contract management side of things at the Home Office. Do we need a break clause specifically to get out of hotels? We don’t. But obviously with the wider picture, I will have to consider not just the functionality of the contract but what our alternatives are—

I will come on to that in a second.

The question is about not just the contracts themselves but what the alternatives are, because we are, on any measure, dealing with a large housing need. I think we will have to progress very carefully, but I can assure you that I have ensured that the Department is sweating the contracts, as it were. The actual accommodation contracts themselves have been the subject of an internal review, which has not reported to me yet, but I have brought in outside expertise to have a look at those contracts and how they are functioning, particularly after we had the issues around taxi usage, as well as the wider concerns that you have just expressed.

It is good to hear that contract management is being improved—I mean, it could not get worse—but what investigations are taking place about misconduct, diversion of public funds and poor performance in these contracts? Will that have a bearing on your view of the break clause? The problem with them is that it was just one massive contract signed by the Home Office, and the subcontracting seems to have been completely unsupervised.

One subcontractor has been removed. I am not able to give too many details, because of commercial and legal sensitivities, but one subcontractor has been removed. I do think that contract management has improved. There is a much tighter grip at the Department on the day-to-day management of those contracts, and the fact that we have been clawing back more money is a sign of that. I am sure there will be more to do. That is why it is being independently reviewed—to make recommendations about what we do in the future. I am very open minded on what we might do on things like the break clause, but our priority is obviously to get out of hotels, for which we do not need to trigger the break clause. The real question is less what the contracts themselves say on exit, and much more about what you are exiting to. So it is right that much of our time and energy is driven on the alternatives and getting that model fit for purpose, while also sweating the actual contracts as they are today. Obviously we also have the independent review, which has not reported to me yet but I am sure will make some recommendations.

You are coming to the theme of my next question: the alternative to hotels. Obviously you have started setting up some large sites in military barracks, but we are all aware of the Home Office’s track record on converting military sites. I think of the Northeye scandal, where I think £350 million of public money was just burned. Are you confident that large sites can be scaled up to the level that they need to be at? When you look at the public reaction to the large sites that have opened, do you think it is working in terms of reassuring the public?

The first thing I would say on large sites is that we are in a better position partly because of all the mistakes that have been made in the past. There have been a lot of lessons to learn from previous attempts to move into large sites.

That’s an understatement.

I think almost every mistake that could have been made has probably been made. The thing I am confident about is that there is a bit more rigour in making sure that we have learned those lessons from what has gone wrong before. It is obviously always tricky to move to a new model and a new design of providing accommodation in this way. While there have been bad experiences in the past, Wethersfield works quite well, with reasonably large numbers, so I think there are examples we can point to that are better practice and that should become the practice overall. As we move into new large sites, I am very clear that we have to do so in a controlled way and have all the checks in place before anything happens—that we move, yes, at pace, but not at the expense of getting things right. Obviously Crowborough has taken some time, but it is now open; the numbers will start small and grow over a period of time, which is the right way to phase in the use.

You have projected savings of £1.1 billion on asylum accommodation by 2029. That is a huge amount of money. Are you on track to make that saving?

Yes, I believe we are. I think we have already saved—I was just checking—something like £500 million. The cost of hotels has come down: in 2023-24, it was £8.3 million a day, and in 2024-25 it was £5.77 million. Savings are already being made. Obviously we will want to go further and meet at least what we are expected to do as part of our funding settlement. I am very clear that we cannot be wasting money on hotels in the way that we are. We need to move to a more sustainable model, but we have already made a large number of savings here, and I am confident we will do more.

I want to press you, Home Secretary, on the accommodation contracts. They are not fit for purpose. No matter how well you manage them, they will make obscene profits for the providers. The cost-plus contracts give providers an incentive to keep people in hotels. It is eight times more profitable to put an asylum seeker in a hotel. Why will the Home Office not exercise the break clause, which is exercisable from next month, and renegotiate new contracts on hotels? You are not going to get out of hotels anytime soon—the numbers in hotels went up last year. It is going down now, but you are not going to get out of them any time soon. Why not exercise the break clause and negotiate a contract that actually works for the taxpayer?

Obviously, I want to make sure that we are getting value for money, not just from the contracts but from the overall picture on accommodation. I have inherited a position where we have been wasting money on hotels. I obviously want to bring that down and get out of hotels as quickly as possible. That is a manifesto commitment. I am not setting myself against the possibility of using the break clause. I think it is right that I have asked somebody to independently look at the contracts and how they are performing. But as I said earlier, the question is also the alternative. The two things go hand in hand. There are not huge numbers of providers in this area. We have a large number of people that we need to accommodate. We obviously do want to get out of hotels. We are going to have to transition to a new system. That will take some time.

But money is being wasted. We have been asking the Home Office for months now why they don’t exercise the break clause. It is exercisable from next month and nothing has happened. People keep telling us, “Yes, we’ll think about it.” Why has it not already happened? Why is it not happening now? Why are you not actively thinking, “We will exercise the break clause as soon as possible and renegotiate new contracts”? These providers are laughing all the way to the bank at the moment, and the Home Office is being supine. It is not good enough.

Well, we should never have been in the position where we were in the contracts in the first place—

But you are.

And we shouldn’t have been in hotels either. Those are policy choices that have been made previously. The difficult factor in what you are saying is more about, as I say, the alternatives and how you transition to a better model for—

No, it’s not. You have to renegotiate the contract without the hotels.

Look, I think we are just going to have to have a point of disagreement between us, but as I say, I have asked for an independent review of those contracts. It will report to me with findings. We do not need a break clause to get out of hotels, which I know is the thing that has caused the outcry about people profiteering. We do not need a break clause to get out of hotels, and we will be getting out of some hotels this year. As I say, we have a manifesto commitment to get out of hotels by the end of the Parliament.

Why do you need a report when we wrote a report last year? Why not read our report? It is plain and simple there. We have explained the issue. You have the facility—the break clause—and there is simply a reluctance to exercise it. I do not understand.

I think that asking somebody with commercial experience to look at the actual contracts so that they are able to advise me on that is the right thing to do.

They are wrong. Tell anyone; they are hopeless.

Home Secretary, I want to push you on the figures, because the Home Office had savings on asylum accommodation of £0.9 billion in one financial year, 2024-25, but it is anticipated to be £1.1 billion over a three-year period. That seems not ambitious enough, given the savings that have already been made. You say you are on track, but why are we not being more ambitious in terms of the cost savings? It follows on from the point about the utilisation of the break clause.

Look, I will want to make sure that we are getting value for money and making as many savings as possible, so I would not say that the £1.1 billion is it—that once we have done that, we can all go home and that we won’t be worrying about savings any more. I will want to go further if we can. We have a particular number that we need to meet. I am confident we will do so. If we can go further, of course we will.

On the move to larger-scale sites, the Committee went to Wethersfield to have a look around the site and so on. One of the big issues, particularly for me, was the way in which the interview process was taking place offsite and only moved to taking place onsite very slowly. Can we have your reassurance that we are not going to end up in a bizarre scenario, when we are looking at larger-scale sites, where the interview process will take place offsite, with transport costs being paid to transport individuals to another part of the country to take part in a remote interview? We have to get to grips with the costs—not just those associated with accommodation but the interview process and the application process costs as well.

You are absolutely right. Obviously, what I want is for as much as you can physically do on site to be done there. As this part of the estate grows, and as we get out of hotels and into more large sites, there will be a rationalisation of what we are able to do. A lot of lessons have been learned, even since Wethersfield, about how we should organise ourselves and how we actually deliver services onsite. I am sure we will be able to do more, and I will look at the specific point on interviews that you raised.

We definitely found that it was much better to have people not travelling many miles.

Generally speaking, we would want to avoid that.

Let’s move on to border security and returns.

Thank you, Home Secretary, for coming in today. Small boat crossings have clearly been the shopfront of a system that has been on its knees for many years, and the crossings dominate a lot of the public discourse and media coverage. We saw, to year-end, 41,307 people crossing the channel from France on small boats, which is a 13% increase from the year before. Meanwhile, we have an asylum backlog of around 80,000 awaiting a first decision, and then there are almost as many—more than 70,000—in the appeals system. Can we get some answers on when you expect those numbers to come down? Lots of my constituents—all of our constituents, I am sure—are deeply concerned about this, yet we still see increases year on year. There are lots of soundbites from the Government—“We’re doing this. We have negotiated something with China to reduce the dinghies”—but nothing seems to be working. Can you update us on how you are going to fix this?

Those numbers are obviously not where I want them to be either. This is an issue of deep concern in my own constituency and my city as well, so I fully hear what you and your constituents are saying. It is exactly where I am as well—these numbers are unacceptable, and they need to come down. This is a fiendishly difficult problem to resolve, and it requires a full-spectrum response. If there was a silver bullet, I promise you that I would have triggered it already—there isn’t. I am afraid you have to do the long-term, careful, painful work of trying to resolve every bit of the problem. That is why dealing with boat engines and getting that agreement with China is important. The Germans have passed a law on warehouse storage of boats, because we know that that is a problem. Getting another Government to prioritise a piece of legislation that they do not need for themselves but would help us a lot is a big thing. That in itself takes time, even where there is good will, as we have had from our German counterparts. Other people’s legislative systems take time. The measures we have taken already with a law enforcement approach have stopped something like 22,000 crossings. I appreciate that the numbers are not good, and I want them to come down much quicker, but without the action we are taking they would be even higher. All of that disruption activity, all of those seizures of equipment, and all of the co-operation with counterparts—particularly in the north of France, but in other parts of Europe as well—helps to manage down the numbers, but obviously we have to go further and make more progress. I have had lots of discussions with my French counterpart about more progress that we can make. It is all part of the solution. On the other side of the equation, the measures I announced on restoring order and control in the asylum system are also designed to deal with the pull factors that we know are attracting people to go and pay their money to a people smuggler, get on a boat, cross the channel and come into this country. We have to deal with the pull factors, we have to go harder on law enforcement on the coast in the north of France, and we also have to get removals even higher than they are today in order to deal with every part of the problem.

With all of that in the round, can you confidently say that this time next year, when you come before the Committee next January, there will not be record numbers and we will not have seen an increase? Are you confident in numbers going down by then, with all the measures you have just talked about?

We are seeing you before January, by the way.

I would love to be in that position, but I cannot guarantee I am going to be in that position because the measures will take some time to come into effect. We will legislate at the earliest opportunity to change the appeal system and further restrict the way that article 8 of the Human Rights Act is interpreted. There is a whole range of legislative changes that we have announced, which we are working at pace to draft and get right before we pass them in a Bill. That all necessarily takes some time. These measures are not overnight solutions—they are not silver bullets—but this is a key area of delivery for us and I am determined to make progress.

I appreciate that, but given all those measures, and looking 12 months down the line, are you confident that the rise will not be as high as it is this year, at 13% at least? If you are not confident that the numbers will go down, are you confident that the rise will not be as steep as this year?

I am confident that we will have made progress on changing the law and clamping down on some of the ways in which the asylum system, as currently constructed, frustrates the removal of people from the country, and can deal with things like appeals more quickly. I am confident we will have made some progress, but I fully expect this Committee and others to hold me to account on what the numbers actually are. I am sure I will be in front of you speaking to whether they have gone up or down long before January next year.

You will.

Are you saying you are not confident the numbers will go down?

I am confident that the measures that we have announced will have an impact and start to bring numbers down. I cannot give you a timeline of exactly when all of that will happen, partly because we have to pass legislation. That all necessarily takes time. We are obviously dealing with counterparts in other countries and when they have passed legislation, that has taken time. There are just some necessary changes that we are making that cannot be done overnight. Do I believe that the full range of policy and legal responses that I have developed to deal with some of these problems will have an impact on numbers? Yes, I do.

Last October, I asked the Border Security Commander and a DG at the National Crime Agency whether they could give any examples of how Brexit had helped us to defend our borders. This is, after all, a post-Brexit problem. They were unable to give me any examples; can you?

Are you saying it is a post-Brexit problem because of the returns?

The returns, the Dublin accord.

I would dispute whether Dublin actually worked as was intended. The EU has now itself created a new pact because its own arrangements were not working as intended, so I would think it is a bit of a stretch. I am sure there are lots of other debates to be had about the rights and wrongs of Brexit, but is Brexit responsible for the boats? I do not think that is true. On returns, it cannot be the case that that was working if the EU itself has changed its posture on its own internal arrangements when it comes to returns.

Why was this not a problem before Brexit?

We used to have people coming across in vans and so on—

Far fewer.

Yes, well—they were able to disappear, though, without being detected. You would not actually know the full number. That is the reality. I do not think you are comparing like for like. This is a new phenomenon of people willing to risk their lives to get across a body of water in a dinghy. You have had organised crime move into this area because they have spotted an opportunity, and because these individuals will pay a lot of money to get on a boat. I think it is a new phenomenon. The idea that this has happened because we have lost the access to Dublin and the returns agreement with the EU—I think that is too much of a stretch.

Obviously illegal immigration is an international phenomenon, and France is the country people are coming from. How has your working relationship been with the French? How impactful is the money we are giving them? What is the increased enforcement in France doing to the number of crossings?

I have been over twice myself to meet my French counterpart—I should say counterparts, because they changed in between. I have met both the Interior Ministers that have served since I have been in the Home Office. We are in regular discussion with colleagues in France. We are obviously renegotiating the so-called Sandhurst agreement, which is the financial arrangement that we have with the French. The thing I want to be able to demonstrate with any new agreement and, in fact, in all our work with the French, is that we are able to demonstrate impact—that we are focusing on the interventions that have the biggest impact on stopping people getting in the boats, and on dealing with the organised crime and so on. Our posture going in is obviously that this is valuable work and it is absolutely necessary, and we really do want, and need, to work with our partners in France. In terms of what we want to get out of the financial arrangement, we want to be able to show that we are pivoting to funding the activities that we know make the biggest difference on the ground. That is what we are looking to do. On the approach that the French take, lots of the interventions often discussed in the media are a matter for the French authorities and their own legal system, so I would not suggest what they could and should do. We are obviously interested in the tactics that they deploy. We work as carefully and as closely as we can with them as they design those tactics and deploy them.

There has been a lot of discussion around the French changing their maritime law in response to the taxi boats phenomenon and the appalling fact that last year 14 people drowned in the channel, including in November a one-month-old child. What have your discussions been like with the French, and what is the progress on their changing their maritime law? What impact do you think that would have if it came into effect?

A change in the French doctrine on maritime tactics is a matter for the French authorities and their own legal system. It would be inappropriate for me to seek to direct how that is applied. I obviously want to see tactics that are safe, but which prevent people from getting on the boats. The fact that we saw the switch to, as you say, the taxi boats phenomenon shows that the other law enforcement approaches on the previous model for the boats was working. That is why organised immigration criminals have shifted to the new model. So I think that the tactics can and do have an impact, but it is for the French to decide exactly how they roll out their new doctrine. What rules will they apply to themselves as they do so? We are watching with interest and want to see a safe way of stopping people physically getting on the boats.

Are you working with the Foreign Office and other Government Departments to ensure that that is joined up in all our relations with France?

Yes.

The one in, one out deal is the other big component of the work with France. It has been going for about six months now and it has six more months to run. You said that we have sent 281 people to France and 350 have come back to the UK. What is the cost-benefit analysis of the success of this scheme? Are those the numbers that we need to start making an impact on the small boats?

As of today—correct me if I am wrong, Dan—we have had 305 people go out and 367 people come in. There is still a discrepancy between the numbers. But throughout the pilot and when we first started, those numbers were heavier on the French side, and that has shifted all the way through. That is usually down to being able to get a flight off with exactly the same number of people on it that we were anticipating. There has been that challenge, but the numbers have for most of the pilot tracked quite close to one another and these will come back into balance soon. So there is not too much to read into that. The numbers have fluctuated and changed throughout the pilot. It was designed as a pilot. It was designed to prove the concept that this could be done and that it was possible to overcome legal hurdles and practical barriers. I think we have shown that it can be done, and it is being done. There is a separate question about the total number you would need to achieve here that could break the business model of the gangs. Obviously, everybody who has been returned to France, all 305, has lost a lot of money. We know two people came over on a boat, were returned to France, came over again and were both returned to France. Those individuals have lost two lots of money, so it has sent a signal to both the individuals looking to get on a boat and also the organised immigration criminals behind them. But it has not dented the numbers yet. There will be a proper evaluation of the pilot as it completes. At that point we will be able to look at everything from costs to impact and practical consequences. That will be done in the normal way. In terms of proving concept and proving that the practical and legal ability to get this done is there, I think it has shown that it is doable.

That is very interesting; thank you. You say that the proof of concept has been established and that does send a signal to people. The question is, how is that signal transmitted? We visited northern France as a Committee and spoke to the French law enforcement officers there and UK law enforcement. Are we able to get inside the calculus that these migrants are making? Do they know this is happening? Is it pushing through the networks? There was a summit last year on social media and organised immigration crime. What is the update from that summit, and how much is this cutting through?

These people know what we are up to, I would say. There is a high degree of knowledge in the cohorts that we are dealing with, both on the organised crime side of things and also the individuals getting on boats. It is quite common for people, when they arrive here in the UK, to ask which hotel they are going to be in. There is an understanding of the system that is quite well developed. So I would imagine these individuals know it is a pilot. They know that the numbers start small. They know that it is trying to prove concept. Has it yet changed their personal calculus? Probably not. They can see a change coming. They may well be banking on it not working, or not being capable of being scaled up. We would obviously want to see much larger numbers. There are both physical constraints to that, and obviously we have to work very closely with our colleagues in France. I think it will be right to say that with bigger numbers, you could probably see the calculus changing, but getting this off the ground itself has been one of the first and biggest hurdles to get over because, of course, as you will know, the minute we started to try to return people to France, we had all sorts of legal challenges. The nature of those legal challenges changes, by the way, every few weeks. Once you shut down one ability to frustrate a removal because of a claim under one bit of modern slavery regulations, another set come in. So there are constant challenges here, and we keep working through them.

Home Secretary, I put it to you that it feels like it is just not working. We as a Committee went over to France. We went to Dunkirk. We went with our French counterparts as a Select Committee as well. It did not seem to me that there was any political will on the French side for this arrangement to work. It was even reiterated to us, “Why would we want to not allow the individuals to get across the channel, and then it is not our problem?”

To be fair, that would be in Paris. That was the French, the central—

Yes, and therefore still reiterated to us. I just want to understand value for money. Already £476 million has been given to the French over a set period—much more recently with the one in, one out deal. When will we start to really understand value for money for taxpayers here in the UK, with our arrangement with France—that it is actually working, given that the numbers that have been returned so far are so pitiful, to be frank?

Let me deal with both parts of that question. On the first one, there are problems in the north of France. It is not simply a case of, “Don’t worry—their end destination is somewhere else and they cause us no trouble while they are here.” There are real community cohesion problems in the north of France. There are issues around criminality, the camps—all of the issues that that are connected to that. I think there is an interest about dealing with this problem. People know that if you are transiting, you are still in another place for often quite long periods of time, and I don’t think the French want to have organised crime operating in this way on their territory either, because that brings other problems for them as well. I think there has been political will. We got an agreement; that was in itself a breakthrough. We got the first flights off; that was in itself a breakthrough. There have been practical issues and legal issues all the way through, for us and for the French as well. They have had to build capacity. We have had to do the same. All these things necessarily take some time. I think that is why the numbers have been smaller, but growing every month. In proving concept it takes two to tango, and the French have obviously played their part here as well. I would want to note and record that we appreciate the collaboration and co-operation that we have had from our French counterparts. We obviously want to build on that. What I would say to you on the money and the agreement is that obviously this is being renegotiated as we speak, and we will need to obviously come to new arrangements with the French. Value for money and impact are the two central goals that I have for what that agreement needs to deliver. I am very focused on impact, because the nature of the organised crime activity—their ability to adapt—means that things that worked three years ago do not work quite so well now. We need to be much more agile and try to keep pace with the changing model that the organised criminals employ. I want a deal where we know that we are funding activity that makes a meaningful difference on the ground, and where there is the agility to switch quickly between different modes of tactics and disruption based on how the organised criminals are changing. Those are the goals that we have going into the negotiation. It will be a publicly demonstrated thing once the agreement is reached. I am sure that we will have discussions about what it really buys for us here in Britain and what it does for the French, but I am very clear that impact and agility within the contract are absolutely central.

We have a couple more questions on asylum and then we are going to move on to policing.

I do not like to disagree with my fellow Committee member, but from our visit to France, I thought it was very clear that there was a political will. Resource is being put in and expended by the French, and it is having a huge, terrible effect on society in places like Dunkirk. Do you agree, Home Secretary?

We managed to do a deal, and we have got flights off—flights have been coming in and going out. That takes big political will and effort, and we do appreciate it.

There is political will; I wonder if there is a lack of imagination. Let me ask you what might seem like a naive question. If every occupant of a boat was sent straight back to France, wherever they were intercepted—even if they landed in the UK—what effect do you think that would have on the trade, if they always knew that would happen?

I think that would kill the trade.

What are the obstacles to doing that?

The much bigger numbers—capacity on the French side to absorb the people coming back in into an estate, which they would need to build; and on our side, detention estate capacity as well.

To kill the trade, could we not sweeten the pill for the French political position? Every year, 40,000 people are coming over anyway—that is the number that came over last year. We could perhaps grant 50,000, or a number of visas, like you are doing in the one in, one out agreement, just to kill the trade. You would not have to do it forever; you could simply do it—

What you are describing is the core of what the ultimate treaty intended to try to achieve, but to get there, those are much bigger numbers, and they would be challenging both for us and the French. That is why the agreement stops—

They are coming over anyway.

But what I would say, with respect, is that you cannot go from nothing at all to massive numbers overnight, and we were trying to prove the concept that you could physically get done and meet the legal—

But you have these people coming over anyway.

The thing that I think would be naive is to imagine you could go from zero to thousands immediately; that is why—

But it would not be every year; just enough to kill the trade.

I would absolutely love to be able to return everybody immediately. The question is, would the French be able to do that?

Sweeten the pill enough to kill the trade.

We had to prove concept; I think we have proved the concept. What I do not think you should ignore or do down are all the legal challenges we are constantly getting that are designed to frustrate removal back to France, which is a safe country—a signatory to the ECHR.

This is refusal of entry, rather than removal.

No, it is our ability to get people on a plane and get them back to France. We are having claims all the time. On our side, we have had practical and legal hurdles to overcome; on the French side, there are practical hurdles to overcome as well.

That is removal; I am talking about refusal of entry.

We obviously want to be able to ultimately break this business model. We are interested in all and any mechanisms that we have at our disposal to do that. It requires co-operation with international partners. We are in the middle of a negotiation at the moment, and I will not—

You could have my idea.

Well, it is a point that has been made by lots of others. Europe in its relationships with Turkey and others has tried similar to break different routes into Europe. It is an understood concept, and it is the core concept that the treaty was designed to try to get towards. Getting to the end point is something that requires negotiation between two sovereign nations.

The Kohler concept will be there for you.

It has three other names at the moment as well, sadly. But for the purposes of this Committee, I believe it could be called the Kohler concept.

Under the last Government, £700 million was spent on the Rwanda scheme, and I think four migrants were removed. When this Government came in we heard they were going to end that scheme immediately. When did the Government formally notify the Rwandan Government?

I am afraid I do not have that exact date to hand. I do not want to give you an incorrect date, but it was understood throughout that—

Do you have a rough idea of when that termination was given?

It was very early after the election when the Government made it clear. There was a transition period, obviously, and there were discussions with the previous Home Secretary and Prime Minister, and we discussed things with the Rwandans at the earliest opportunity after the election—

Earliest opportunity—do you have a date?

I cannot recollect one off the top of my head.

It was a major project at the Home Office. I am quite surprised you have no idea when notification was given.

The Rwandans knew that we were always intending to cancel that deal—

I am asking when the formal notification was given.

I can write to the Committee with a date of the formal notification. I do not want to misspeak—no, I have been given the date: 16 December 2025.

December? After an election in July. That is extraordinary.

And in 2025.

I think that was the formal notification.

That was the formal notification, which related to the passing of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act—

Is that December 2025 or 2024?

We had to revoke the legislation, which happened as part of the border security Act. When that came in, we had the formal notification—that does not mean that we were not having discussions. Obviously, these matters are now before the International Court of Arbitration, but there were discussions with the Rwandan Government immediately after the election. The formal notification was linked to the repealing of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act, which was done under the border security Act.

So December 2025 was the formal notification.

That was the formal notification post the Act passing into law, but long before that, and soon after we came into Government, there were conversations with the Rwandans to explain to them our position as a Government. I am very happy, on a private basis, to share with the Committee a timeline. I hope that the Committee will appreciate that we are in front of an international court, so there are matters of legal confidentiality and things that we need to abide by, but on a private basis I am happy to share with the Chair what happened and when. We have received legal advice throughout, and we believe that we have a strong case, which we intend to defend robustly in the Court of Arbitration. To be clear, we have advice from senior counsel as to our position, and we are pretty confident that we can prevail.

Okay. Maybe you can write to us on that and we can it follow up, because that seems extremely important.

We need to move on, I am afraid, to policing. We are going to start with the topic of the Aston Villa versus Maccabi Tel Aviv game, which we have been looking at very closely as a Committee—not something we expected to be looking at quite as closely as we have, but you know we have.

I heard and completely accept your statement to the House of 14 January that you were not told definitively that there would be a recommendation to ban away fans from the match. However, the Home Office was told on 8 October that the working assumption was that there would be no away fans. Did you know that?

No. What I know is exactly as I set out in my statement and what Sir Andy Cooke found in his report. I chaired a meeting of several police leaders. We had a discussion about public order incidents—in the wake of the terrible terrorist attack in Manchester, so it was specifically a conversation about public order laws—and we did some horizon scanning at the end of the meeting. Other chief constables told me what was on their mind about events that were coming up, which were posing public safety challenges, potentially. That was mentioned at the end as well, in exactly the way I set out in my statement.

On 8 October, when the Home Office was told that the working assumption was that there would be no away fans, who did know, Mr Hobbs? Do we know?

Evidence has already been given to the Committee about what was said in front of me on 8 October—

The Home Office was told; I am trying to find out who was told and, ultimately, given it was such an important issue, why it was not raised to ministerial level. You were not told, and I am assuming no Ministers were told. Is that correct?

It is my understanding that even on 15 October, in an email exchange, it was still believed that all options were on the table. I think my officials were trying to get information all the way through about what was going on. The possibility was raised on 8 October, and there is the email exchange about all options—

Not the possibility; the working assumption was that there would be no away fans—

That is not what was said to me.

I am not saying it was said to you; I am saying it was said to the Home Office. That is why I asked, and I will ask Mr Hobbs in a moment—

As late as 15 October, it was still said to Home Office officials that all options were on the table.

But on 8 October—it is there from the UKFPU; they have written it—the Home Office was told that the “working assumption” was that there would be no away fans. What I am trying to find out is what happened to that information. Was it raised at a ministerial level? Mr Hobbs, do you know? Dan Hobbs: I am afraid I do not know. That is not something with which I am familiar.

Could you come back to us on that point, please? [Interruption.] Ah, a note has appeared.

Look, I can write back to the Committee. I don’t believe the evidence is going to go further than what you have already heard directly from—

I will tell you why it is important. The Home Office was told that it was very likely that the recommendation would be no away fans. What I would like to know is, given that the Home Office was told that on the 8th, why they did not at that point say, “Hold on. There is an issue here. We can find additional resources.” Rather than waiting until the decision was made, knowing that it was highly likely, why was the Home Office not proactive?

I have to go back to the doctrine of operational independence. It is not for the Home Office to carry out a risk assessment of a public event that could be taking place. I couldn’t override that risk assessment. If the chief constable—

Tell them—

Let me finish my point, please, Mr Kohler. If the chief constable of West Midlands police asserts, “I cannot possibly put this event on safely. Here are the risks,” I can’t override that and say, “I don’t believe those risks exist.”

I am not asking you to override it.

There is a respect for operational independence that, in the current arrangements, does have to be observed. Once the decision was made, we of course asked West Midlands police, “Is there a way of mitigating the risks you say exist, that we could assist with, that would allow this match to go ahead in the way that we would all like to see?”

And why could you not have said that when you were told that it was highly likely that that was going to be—

Because they have to do their risk assessment. This is why I have asked Andy Cooke to look at the whole of the process for coming to these decisions in the first place. There was a deep desire not to interfere with the operational independence of the police as they were making their risk assessment and deciding whether the event could be safely put on. Once that decision was made, it was appropriate to say, “Is there a way around this problem?” By the way, if they had come back and said, “No, there isn’t,” it wouldn’t have been possible to override that either.

I am not asking you to override it.

No, but I am trying to give you the context. To just take one incident and say that we should interfere in operational independence based on our current arrangements is not right—

Time is limited—

Let me finish. That is why I have asked Andy Cooke to look at two things: first, what exactly happened in relation to West Midlands police, but also to advise further on what we do with safety advisory groups going forward. As this event has shown, when not done properly, these things can have big impacts for community cohesion here at home and our position abroad. That is why I have asked for that review to take place. But I think it was the Home Office officials’ position that they were seeking to respect operational independence.

Can I turn to Mr Hobbs on this point?

I am afraid that Mr Hobbs doesn’t cover this area of policy, so you are asking him to answer on a thing that he is not responsible for.

I am going to ask Mr Hobbs a general point. If the Home Office is told that something is likely to happen and that it will have clear implications on a national level, are you really saying not that you won’t interfere but that you won’t even have a conversation about whether there might be solutions? Is the Home Office not proactive enough to say, “Hold on. There might be solutions”? I would love Mr Hobbs to answer this one.

You can ask Mr Hobbs, but I don’t believe he can answer your question.

Well, I have more confidence in him. Dan Hobbs: As the Home Secretary said, in this circumstance, this is not something I am familiar with and work on. Obviously, we work very closely with the ministerial team, and when things happen, there is obviously a way of notifying. But as I say, in the circumstance you are talking about, I am afraid that I can’t comment on the Home Secretary’s position.

The officials that were involved were seeking to respect operational independence and not to try to override an independent risk assessment. The problem that this case has shown, and the reason why I lost confidence in the chief of West Midlands police, is that that risk assessment could not have been relied upon, because it was wrong. It was based on false evidence and all the other findings that Sir Andy Cooke made. The actual problem here is about the ability to trust a risk assessment made by the police. That has gone horribly wrong in this case. There are two things that I have asked Sir Andy Cooke to look at. One, which he has already reported on, was the run-up to the decision being made, and whether the risk assessment was flawed, which he has said it was. The second is how we operate in relation to safety advisory groups and big public events in the first place. Is it right that the Home Office never interferes because of operational independence? Can a Minister ever override an independent risk assessment or say, “We wish to see an event take place. Here are the resources to make it happen”?

You are adopting the technique of your predecessor now—

No—

If we could have a short answer, that would be great.

I am answering your question with some context to make you understand exactly what happened here.

Can I leave it at this? Please can you write back to the Committee to say at what level the message from the UKFPU was seen, and where it went? It is very clear that the UKFPU told the Home Office that its “working assumption” was that there would not be away fans. We would like to know where that message went, if anywhere.

I am sure that my officials are watching and will be able to respond. But evidence on this exact point has been given before to your Committee by the director general who was responsible for this.

No, we have not had that answer, but I look forward to your note.

I think a lot of evidence has been given to the Committee about various email exchanges and conversations that took place. I do not believe that much will be added to that but, of course, if it can be, I will make sure it is.

Thank you. That will assist us, because we will be producing a short report on our findings shortly. We will move on to the wider issue of police reform.

We have obviously heard some of the reforms your Department is proposing. We have heard that it will restore national targets and set minimum standards for police forces. The Government’s safer streets mission talks about increased public confidence and having named, contactable officers. How will this reorganisation help with any of that? Will it not just add more bureaucracy?

No, I think it restores a system that the public can have confidence in. We have seen confidence decrease. We know that neighbourhood policing has been decimated, and we are seeking to bring it back. I believe that good neighbourhood policing is the absolute bedrock of a well-functioning police service. The reforms are designed to ensure that we always have the right policing in the right place. Once the reforms are fully implemented, the national police service will have the ability to go after international terrorists, fraudsters and serious organised crime. There will be a smaller number of regional forces that are able to respond to big peaks in demand—public order events, murder investigations, and rape and serious violence investigations. Within them there will be local police areas, whose one job, and one job only, is to police their local areas and respond to local concerns, with neighbourhood policing as the absolute bedrock. That model will ensure that we stop what happens at the moment, which is that it is easy to deprioritise so-called lower-level offending because the monetary value is lower or violence is not involved, and to focus on the serious offences. We all know that that lower-level offending hurts communities, kills pride in our areas, and damages cohesion and the economy of our local areas. I want to make sure that the new model does not mean that good neighbourhood policing and good local police areas focused on local policing get sacrificed to deal with peaks in demand for public order or serious and specialist investigations. It is designed to make sure that we are always able to have the right policing in the right area and that every type of crime is covered properly and pursued in the way that the public would expect.

Greater Manchester police, which this Committee recently met, and my own force, Devon and Cornwall, have raised serious concerns about the increasingly huge geographical areas forces are going to cover, particularly in places like Devon and Cornwall, which is hugely rural already. You are looking at expanding that massively, so it is quite hard for lots of forces to understand the concept of going back to their communities and being community focused, when you are making them much broader and bigger. Devon and Cornwall tell me that they are £3 million short. They have cancelled a front desk that they were going to open in Launceston in my constituency. There was a sexual assault of a teenager there last week; she was not able to go to that front desk, because it has now been cancelled. I am struggling to understand—and so are the police I talk to in Greater Manchester as a Committee member and in Devon and Cornwall as a constituency MP—how making these forces much, much bigger will bring the community-centred approach that you keep talking about.

Because within those forces, you will have local police areas that are designed to be community facing. The move to the smaller number of regional forces is about being able to meet—

That is not the trend we are seeing.

Well, it is not happening at the moment, because the reforms are not in place. The point is that the new model—

But is there suddenly going to be lots of funding coming with the reforms? At the moment, there is not the funding to have the community police.

If you will let me finish my point, the new model in its totality is designed to ensure that community policing does not suffer from peaks in demand elsewhere. It is designed to do what happens everywhere in Greater Manchester, where you have a reasonably large force that is not encumbered with significant national responsibilities and therefore is able to focus on policing its area effectively. That is a contrast with what happens at the Met, which is also a very large force, but has all counter-terror policing for the whole country sitting within it. As we saw from the Casey review, that has an impact on prioritisation and what happens at the Met. I want to take that national capability into the national police service, so that the Met can get on with policing London. The whole point of the totality of the reforms is to make sure that local communities are policed effectively, so that wherever you are in the country, whether rural or urban, all those areas do have good-quality neighbourhood and local policing.

Finally, Home Secretary, the reforms are coming on the back of the abolition of PCCs. What is happening there? We seem to be having PCCs abolished in, I think, 2027 and these huge reforms are going to be coming in after that. It all feels a bit back to front, doesn’t it?

No, they are up for re-election in, I believe, 2028—

Forgive me.

Those elections will not be proceeding and the post will be abolished. I have a review—

How will the Committee sit with those reforms? Obviously, taking Devon and Cornwall again, that will be a separate Committee and it won’t be appropriate.

I will obviously want to make sure that we phase those changes in appropriately. Where we do not have directly elected mayors being able to do the policing scrutiny function, we will have local crime and policing boards, and we are obviously looking at policy design of that at the moment. I have deliberately set out the reforms over a longer period of time to avoid some of the issues seen in Scotland, where they made big changes in just a year, which had a big impact and took many years to resolve. These are very, very significant reforms. I want to make sure that we get them right and that we do them in a way that means we do not put at risk operational effectiveness—for example, as we are setting up the national police service. I have asked for, and I am going to very soon announce, the reviewer who will carry out the review of how we transition to a smaller number of regional forces, what the right number should be and the mechanism by which that change should take place. So there will be more to say on this in the coming months, but the intention is to phase the reforms so that they sit alongside one another properly. But they will take some time.

Home Secretary, you have, as you say, set out a longer implementation period for changes to forces. Whatever their views on their local force, what everyone probably would not want to see is chopping and changing because of different Governments choosing to change boundaries every now and then on force sizes. Clearly, it has been a long time since police reform has been attempted on this scale. What steps are you taking to try to forge a political consensus that will last beyond this Government—particularly in reflecting on previous attempts to change forces?

As I say, these are, on any measure, very significant reforms and will take time to deliver. Obviously, I have to go out and win an argument, and we will need to legislate, so there will be appropriate moments, as we are seeking to pass legislation here, to be talking to Opposition parties as well—I will obviously always do so, even as we are finalising policy design. These are the right reforms. They have been welcomed by policing leaders across many different organisations, including those organisations that will see themselves abolished and moved into the national police service. There is a recognition that at the moment we have a structure of doing everything 43 different ways. It is not a rational structure and it is not what you would start with if you were designing the system from scratch today. We cannot let difficulty and time get in the way of bringing forward reforms that will deliver for local people. In the end, this is about having a police service that the whole country can have confidence in and is proud of, and where the people who work in it know they are delivering a high quality of service wherever they are and whatever type of work they are doing. There is a political argument there to be won. It is obviously my job to go out there and win that, but I take comfort from the fact that such a wide range of leaders within policing have welcomed the reforms and acknowledged that something needs to be done and that this is the right way to go about it.

When you call the police, they should come. When you report a crime, it should be properly investigated. But too many constituents of mine, and I am sure many others, do not feel that that is currently the case. Recognising that you have set out a longer implementation period for macro change, what can constituents of ours expect to see in this Parliament in terms of improvement in some of that performance?

We are at the moment, I think, at 2,400 extra neighbourhood police officers and on track to meet the commitment to have 3,000 extra by the end of March. We will see another increase in neighbourhood policing in the coming year, and we will keep making progress towards our target of 13,000 extra neighbourhood officers. We have already rolled out the commitment for a named, contactable officer in every neighbourhood in the country as well. So there are already changes happening that I think are the right changes and that can rebuild confidence in policing. Under the previous Administration, there was a big change away from the powers of the Home Secretary and the Home Office itself, in terms of its place within the policing system—not just in terms of being able to remove a chief constable, which obviously came up in the context of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football match issue, but in terms of the wider ability to set minimum standards and to have accountability. That was taken away and placed with police and crime commissioners. Again, the totality of the reforms on accountability, standards and the performance framework is designed to make sure that the whole service meets the standards that we would all rightly expect of it. It gives the Home Secretary and the Home Office a much bigger role in making that happen.

Will that be coming in more quickly? In the next year or two, will people be able to start seeing those standards?

We will legislate. Some of these things require legislation—others less so—but I think that changing the powers of the Home Secretary and the requirements of policing leaders to report in centrally will require legislation. It will hopefully happen as quickly as possible. I am obviously not hanging about, and I do want to get a move on, but I think that, necessarily, some of the bigger structural changes will just take longer. That is the right thing to do, because you do not want to impact operational issues on the ground.

We are going to move on to neighbourhood policing.

The number of neighbourhood policing roles has gone up 2,383 and the overall police workforce has fallen by 2,050 in the 12 months to September 2025. Are you happy with how the police workforce has changed in the year up to September 2025?

I make no apology for prioritising neighbourhood policing. We saw that all but disappear under the previous Administration, and we made a policy commitment, a manifesto commitment, to bring that back. We believe in neighbourhood policing as the bedrock of good policing across the whole country. I am pleased to see the numbers of neighbourhood officers increasing. On headline numbers—I made this point in the House as we were debating the White Paper—there has been a big focus on overall headline numbers and less of a focus on what officers are doing. I want to focus much more on what officers are doing and what standards we are holding the police service to, rather than just the headline number. I think your Committee might have heard evidence before about the distorting effect of the officer maintenance grant: we have ended up with 12,000 officers in desk jobs and 250 warranted officers doing HR. That is not a sensible system that is using its warranted police officers in the right way. My focus is less on the headline number and much more on what those officers are doing. Again, the rest of the reforms I have announced are about making sure that the service that is being provided is to a very high standard, is something the public can have confidence in and puts us in a better position to cut crime.

I think everybody sitting here is very supportive of neighbourhood policing—who wouldn’t be? My local police force is the Met, so you would have a named officer, but what is not picked up at all—I did notice a mention of it in the White Paper—is abstractions. The low-level crime—shoplifting and that kind of thing—is where the sense of people feeling safe in their communities comes from, and I know you feel very strongly about that. Well, what if officers are not there? That is quite often, isn’t it? We had the previous Home Secretary, who said, “It’s tricky. I don’t know what we are going to do about it.” I am interested in abstractions, because for communities like mine, it is very upsetting.

Let me come back to you specifically on abstractions; I am happy to write to you and also refer to your previous discussions with my predecessor. I want to reassure you that this is about making sure that, in every community, you get the same standard of service. I think we would all agree that there is very much a postcode lottery in terms of the service that different communities get across the country from the police for different types of crime. Some police force areas make a real priority of going after so-called low-level offences, because they do not consider them low-level offences: they know that if you crack down on those, you have a bigger impact on offences at the more serious violence end of the spectrum. That does not happen everywhere. I want to make sure that, wherever you live—whether you are in beautiful countryside or in an urban city like mine—it does not really matter: you know who your named, contactable officer is, you know that your queries will be responded to in a reasonable timeframe and you know that each type of crime will be prioritised, because within the new model there will be different people whose responsibility it is to go after those.

I note what you said about neighbourhood policing being hollowed out, but that certainly was not the case in Staffordshire. Over the years our police and crime commissioner there, and the chief constables, have been very determined to make sure we have local policing, so I respectfully disagree on that point.

But I think we can agree that at a national level the numbers fell significantly, at the very least.

As I say, that certainly wasn’t the case in Staffordshire.

Home Secretary, I am sure you agree that for neighbourhood policing to work, the police need to be accessible to the public, and local police stations that are accessible to the public are critical to that. What would you say to my constituents in the borough of Merton who are about to lose all their police front counters, meaning the police will not be accessible in Merton? Is that a sensible way forward?

I won’t comment on individual cases like that because—

What would you say to my constituents, though?

Those are operational decisions for the local service to make. Those are decisions for local services to make, not for me to seek to dictate. Those local decisions are made by others. The totality of the reforms that we are rolling out as a Government are about rebuilding neighbourhood policing as the absolute bedrock of the police service, so all your constituents at a neighbourhood level will have a named, contactable officer, and the police are expected to meet the 72-hour target for non-urgent, non-priority casework as well. I hope your constituents will see a much more localised service that they can avail themselves of if they need to.

Do you see local police stations as having a role in that accessibility?

They may or may not. That is a matter for local forces.

You have no opinion on the matter.

It is for local forces to make that decision.

As Home Secretary, you have no view on police stations.

We have lost police stations in my constituency as well. As Home Secretary, I believe it is my responsibility, as someone who believes in the power of neighbourhood policing, to restore it and to make sure we have a new regime of minimum standards that everyone everywhere can expect. That is as true for your constituents as it is for mine.

To finish off, Robbie Moore is going to ask about grooming gangs.

I want to understand why we are now well over a year since the previous Home Secretary made the initial announcement that we are going to have five local inquiries. The Home Secretary at the time was confident enough to reference Oldham at that point. We are now well over a year on, and Baroness Longfield has been appointed to do the national inquiry, but why, despite all the information that I, leading experts and others have given the Home Office, is the Home Office still not confident enough to announce the inclusion of a specific spotlight on Bradford district, yet it was happy enough to mention Oldham more than a year ago?

The position a year ago was different from where we are today. After the previous Home Secretary made those comments, we of course had the Casey audit and moved to having a national inquiry, so the picture has not remained static in the year you are referring to. We are moving ahead with the grooming gangs inquiry. We have been clear that the terms of reference will deal with all the issues related to grooming gangs and the concerns people have. We obviously have the chair in place, and we are not far from being able to confirm the terms of reference. There will be a consultation period, as is natural and normal in these circumstances. The inquiry will get under way very soon and will be allowed to carry on with its work. It has a three-year programme of work. I know that you and other Members have lobbied for your areas to be included as part of the work the grooming gangs inquiry will undertake. I repeat the position that I made clear in the Chamber: it will now be for the inquiry, and the chair, to consider those areas. I am sure that she and the rest of the panel will have heard the desire for Bradford to be part of that, but it would be wrong for me, now that we have an independent inquiry and a chair, to try to dictate where they go and where they do not go.

Baroness Casey’s audit was very detailed and thorough, and on page 151 it specifically said that while the national inquiry is being set up “police forces and other relevant agencies should in the meantime be required not to destroy any relevant records” relating to grooming gangs. I have done a freedom of information request to West Yorkshire police and to the Bradford safeguarding partnership, and neither of those organisations has received any formal directive from the Home Office asking for no grooming gang records to be destroyed, and specifically saying that those records should be retained for a national inquiry. I put these points to the permanent secretary as well when we had her before the Committee. Why has the Home Office not issued a direction to all safeguarding bodies?

I believe that direction has been issued, so let me—

Well, it’s not been issued to West Yorkshire police and the Bradford safeguarding partnership.

Let me take that back, because it did come up before. It remains my understanding today that everybody who needed to have been written to has been written to and told to protect all records for the purposes of the inquiry. I will check that and get back to you in writing. [Interruption.]

I think that alarm tells us that we have hit midday.

Mr Murray’s alarm! [Laughter.]

Exactly. We are very good as a Committee at making sure we all know what we are doing. Thank you so much for coming, Home Secretary. We look forward to seeing you in very short order, I am sure, for more questions—

I think it’s a year, according to Mr Maguire!

Definitely sooner than that. I will bring the session to a conclusion.