Speeches by Eagle.

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

“—which we asked Clearsprings to do. In doing some of the detailed work around that, it became clear that Clearsprings had not been providing an appropriate trail of their contacts with major subcontractors, and so we are having an open audit of the whole thing across the piece, not only with Clearsprings. We are trying…”

“We do require them to find us dispersed accommodation and other accommodations, and they are constantly on the search for such things. I often get approached by MPs who have heard rumours that various suppliers are looking at buildings in their areas and want to know about it. Some of that is literally just surveying t…”

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

“We are trying to look cross-Government at this, because there is a shortage of temporary accommodation in other capacities as well. One thinks of the number of households who have been made temporarily homeless in local authority areas because of no-fault eviction, for example—all of them in bed and breakfast or expens…”

“£500 million-ish.”

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

“Non-performance-related issues.”

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

“This financial year.”

“In future?”

“First, on the ODA, I share your frustration. Again, it was a legacy issue that we have inherited. The best thing we can do is try to get the costs of these contracts down so some of that money can be sent back to that budget, so that we can do some preventative work in the world to try to prevent flows of migration whe…”

“I see it regularly.”

“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, …”

“That work has begun, and we are looking at some work on bridging contracts as well. We have been out to the market to look at how we might evolve. Joanna, I don’t know if you want to go into a little bit of detail about that.”

“The faster the system works, the more ODA savings will be made, if we make a saving. However, because we inherited such big backlogs of people who have been here a long time, when we speed the backlog up, those people have already gone out of eligibility for ODA money.”

“One of the issues with large sites was that they tended to be old MOD sites. I think Joanna has had a lot of experience trying to bring them on board and get them up to any kind of scratch when they had asbestos-filled buildings, poisoned land, unexploded ordinance and all those sorts of things on old army bases. A lot…”

“Let me have a look at the specific parliamentary question you asked and write to you about the context and tell you what we can provide you with.”

“Every old or derelict site has its issues and problems. However, I think it will be cheaper to bring sites like that on board if you are closing hotels. We wish to work in collaboration with local authorities rather than against them, which has often happened in the past, where you get many issues with planning permiss…”

“To be fair to civil servants in the Home Office, Mr Murray—again, I was not there at the time— there was a centralised push from a small ministerial group that was not in the Home Office only to provide large sites. I think that is detailed in the Northeye PAC report for all to read in all its glory. With all due respe…”