Speeches by Eagle.

“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…”

“£500 million-ish.”

“If you look at the number before the election, there was a 70% drop in the number of initial decisions taken. It was illegal to process anyone who had arrived in the country after March 2023, and they were just piling up because they kept on coming. Therefore, we were having to deal with just a system that was paralyse…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“There are other things, such as we are trying to operate temporary accommodation in a housing shortage situation where there is a great deal of pressure on it. There are financial and practical constraints of opening up new supply. You cannot overburden particular areas with dispersed accommodation, because there might…”

“Jo will come in on the details of the contracts, but clearly we want to get out of hotels. The key part of doing that is to have the system that was paralysed, as I talked about earlier, working again so we get some throughput through hotels that gives us some more leeway. Obviously, it depends on demand at the other e…”

“I do not personally like it. I do not think it is something that I would have signed off on, but we are where we are on that. I think that certainly in theory, there are swings and roundabouts in the way in which you try to contract for services that are like this. There are advantages and disadvantages of different wa…”

“I do not think it is blind, and I think certainly if an issue arose we could quite quickly find out what was going on, but I do not think we have in real time sight across the whole piece of what is going on everywhere. We can get to the bottom of things quite quickly if we have to, but I do not think the contracts tha…”

“No, I won’t let you.”

“If I could answer initially, when I first came into office—only from July last year—I was briefed on these contracts and how they worked. I also talked, not only in the Tea Room but around the place, to people who had experiences on the ground of the impact in their local areas. I was not really satisfied that we had t…”

“Lose sight of what?”