Speeches by Eagle.

“No.”

“No, not in public, I am afraid, at the moment. Sorry to be so opaque.”

“I am glad you enjoyed your visit to Wethersfield. It has taken a while to establish and stabilise, and I do not think large sites are the answer to what we are trying to do elsewhere for some of the reasons that you have talked about—the complexity of trying to find usable sites, and not least because they are remote a…”

“It would be the vast majority.”

“That is very much my view. Trying to have an asset at the end of this that could be used for temporary accommodation if such needs arise again would be a better use of public money.”

“Yes.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“Simon may have more detail, but my understanding is that the development assistance budget only applies to people who claim asylum in this country for the first 12 months. Various bits to do with the accounting for that are going on.”

“That is what we are testing in the work that is going on at the moment. Crucially, the pilots that we are going to be doing are intended precisely to give those kinds of choices as the break clauses approach.”

“I do not think the previous Government were interested in change, and the present Government are. We started the work as soon as we possibly could.”

“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.”

“Clamping down on illegal working is a crucial element of our strategy to tackle immigration crime. Since coming to office, this Government have increased raids, arrests and civil penalties to their highest levels in years. Our Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill will introduce tougher provisions in this area, …”

“Anyone who is in a hotel is someone who has claimed asylum, and whose asylum claim is pending. They are not necessarily illegal immigrants at all, and the hon. Lady should make that position clear.”

“There is an amendment to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill that extends the requirement to check illegal working to the gig economy, the zero-hours economy and all those areas that have non-traditional employer-employee relationships. I look forward to being able to operationalise that when the Bill beco…”

“To tackle illegal migration, we must work across borders in co-operation with other jurisdictions. Were we to leave the European convention on human rights, we could not work with those that sign up to it.”

“When people arrive and claim to be children, there are tests at the border to check whether we think they are children. If they are accepted as children, they are put into local authority care, so they should not be in asylum accommodation at all. If they are seen to be adults and end up in asylum accommodation, they c…”