Speeches by Kane.

“For me, as the new boy here, is it normal to have more than one, or to have only you?”

“If you would just indulge me on one question, I think you said that you are now the only accounting officer in the Department, but there were two before.”

“This is a comment, not a question. I suppose the thing I am getting from this is that there is a real alarm bell here: we will hear an awful lot of you saying, “With the benefit of hindsight”. What I am really worried about, as I said, is that earlier in this process an awful lot of people were giving you advice that c…”

“Right, so there is a proper procedure that you will follow, and you will resist the urge to speed it up in order to draw a line under this matter.”

“Sorry to keep on at this. In terms of moving at pace to dispose of it, how do you ensure that you are not pushed to dispose of it quickly and therefore not realise the best value? How will you make that judgment call about timings versus value for disposing of the asset?”

“Okay. It sits there for eight weeks, and then you will take a period of time to come up with a proper disposal case—a business case.”

“Talk to me about the timescales. How long will it sit on this register before you then say, “Well, no one wants it. Let’s move to sale”?”

“I suppose the question I am asking you is this. You now have a site, and you have decided that you are either going to sell it or see whether another Department wants it. There is still a business case to be done for that endeavour. You are still going to have to make sure you do that, so is a business case being worke…”

“But whether it is a separate business case or a chapter in the bigger business case, the work still needs to be done. Is it going to be done now? You still have the site, and you are going to have to decide how to get the best value for it.”

“Where do business cases feed into your thinking generally? It strikes me that if the decision not to proceed to the full business case was to do with pace, you could have done the process concurrently. You wouldn’t have had to say, “Don’t do it.” You could have said, “We’re going to proceed at pace, but could someone p…”

“So the decision not to proceed from the outline business case to the full business case was based on the idea that you could not get it done in time. It was to do with the timings; it was not that you saw anything alarming in the outline business case.”

“When you say a draft, are we talking a first draft or a final draft?”

“So there is a business case that exists—”

“Moving on to the business case for the purchase of the site: that was a condition of the Treasury’s approval for purchase, but you did not do one. Why did you not do one?”

“In a hypothetical future purchase, if you follow all of your procedures, there will be a timescale attached to it. In the future, if you are pushed to operate at a pace greater than you can achieve by following all of the procedures as they are laid out, you will then face a choice: to ignore or bypass some of them as …”

“There seems to be an awful lot of voices in this process who are giving you warnings—you are hearing the warnings throughout. Today, you are saying that hindsight is giving you more warnings, which you are incorporating into procedures. What are you going to do to ensure that you do not ignore those voices in the futur…”

“You went ahead with the purchase the following day. I am just wondering—this may be a mindset question—why you assured the Cabinet Office, which approves Government property purchases, that you could manage the risks when you did not fully understand what they were.”

“From the Report, you sought, but were not granted, an exemption from complying with the standard approval of the acquisition by the Office of Government Property within the Cabinet Office. Following its review in 2023, the Cabinet Office highlighted to the Minister for Immigration significant risks with the acquisition…”

“In one of your earlier responses, you talked about setting up working groups of local government associations and local authorities. That is really nice, but—I will probably make this point across the board—could you also articulate what you are doing with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in your responses? If we a…”

“Can I drill down on one specific risk? It strikes me—I wonder whether you would agree, Sir Peter—that a great one is the need for cultural change among your people if you are moving from some things being paper-based to a digital world. I know what I am like and what most of us in this room are probably like: we all ha…”