Speeches by Eagle.

“From end-to-end, it is £300 million and something.”

“My understanding is that the way that it works is that they have to look across three or four years to check on what has been going on forensically with the audit, and that moneys have not been switched or changed around. We are using independent auditors to interrogate the information that we have been given, to check…”

“I would like to have much more transparency. I would like to have a different way of trying to deliver at the very local level in ways that are more accountable—rather than commercially accountable, more democratically accountable. That is why as soon as I came into this job, I got hold of the Local Government Associat…”

“It hasn’t gone down. That is the cost to date, and there is still three and a half years more to run on the contract. The NAO got slightly the wrong end of the stick on that one. We are expecting the value of the contract to be higher.”

“I think that, necessarily, given the shape of the contracts that we have inherited, where we have a prime relationship with a large provider that then subcontracts all the way down to either hotel or dispersed accommodation, it is quite difficult to get a proper handle on what is going on in every instance. Certainly, …”

“It would be the vast majority.”

“Which part of the contract are you referring to and when?”

“I tend to get a report on that weekly.”

“Inspections have doubled as well. There is much more focus on these day-to-day elements of running contracts.”

“Then there is also the assurance and inspections, and they have gone up a lot in the last few months as we have managed to focus more on actually managing the contracts by stabilising the system, moving away from all of the distractions that the previous regime managed to create about large sites in Rwanda. It just ena…”

“This is back in 2020-21 and I do not think any of us were there then, but we are happy to go back, investigate and get back to you.”

“When? Do you mean in 2019?”

“I see it regularly.”

“Non-performance-related issues.”

“The 2019 contract lasts 10 years with break clauses coming up in 2026. We inherited those contracts. We are spending time focusing much more on performance and all the indicators that colleagues have talked about in more detail before you today. We will always bear in mind the performance that we get from our contracto…”

“Yes, higher than when it was first set, for understandable reasons.”

“We became aware of problems in relation to Stay Belvedere Hotels Ltd at the beginning of this year, and we became aware of performance issues—non-performance-related issues, I should say—with that chain. They provided 51 hotels to the portfolio that Clearsprings had, and we made it clear, following information that we …”

“This is the second audit, Mr Davies, of these contracts. There was one in 2021, I understand.”

“There are obligations with respect to this. Clearly, if there is a child who turns up mistakenly in adult accommodation and they claim they are a child when they get there, the local authority must be contacted, and the local authority will do what is known as a Merton assessment. We do not knowingly disperse children …”

“They can go to the accommodation provider and say, “I am a child”, and if they do that then the accommodation provider for safeguarding reasons would contact the local authority.”