Speeches by Eagle.

“No.”

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

“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.”

“Thank you very much. I am Angela Eagle. I am the Member of Parliament for Wallasey, and I am the Minister for asylum and border security.”

“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…”

“We inherited this situation as we inherited the contracts that you are looking into over a 10-year period. These contracts were let in 2019 when the context was quite different to the one that we are working in now. I do not want to speak for the people that let the contracts particularly, but we do know that the overa…”

“It is important to get the context. The position is that we are not anticipating a different approach to sharing of rooms. We are where we are on that one. What we are trying to do as a Government is to get out of hotels as quickly as possible because of the extra costs. There are certain circumstances where people are…”

“I did not say that, but if one were going to say that no rooms had to be shared at all, you would double or treble the number of hotel rooms required overnight. What we are trying to do is get down the inordinate cost of the system we have at the moment. You do not do that by doubling the cost with one decision overnig…”

“First, can I apologise for not writing to you? I will take that up with my office when I get back from here. That should have happened, so my apologies for that. Secondly, when these contracts were let by our processors, they were very overarching contracts, and we contract with the prime suppliers. You also have to re…”

“These hotels and these contracts—[Interruption.] Shall I save that until after the vote?”

“I was about to comment on how much the landscape changed from when these contracts were first let out, because they did not involve hotels at all. Certainly, talking to colleagues in the Home Office after the hotels reached their peak in 2023, the Home Office was then in this kind of 10-point plan frenzy of trying to m…”

“I was not there.”

“There is a separate issue about Stay Belvedere that came to light. I think the best thing to say about all of this is that when I first got into the Home Office, I was surprised at the size of the contracts, the cost of the contracts, and the controls being quite weak. Certainly, the Department has increased the compli…”

“—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…”

“I do not know whether colleagues might have more detailed information.”

“I was there when this happened, but—”

“Some of you may not be surprised that it came up with the view that there were no profits. However, it appears that there are profits this time, and so that audit is going on. We are expecting it to finish around the end of this month. There will then be some iterations of that and questions that we ask of our provider…”