Speeches by Murray.

“First, I thank all three of you for the very important report that you have produced. I want to go back to the question of when you decided to call for a national inquiry. We had Alexis Jay and Tom Crowther here. You said that your own views evolved about the need for a national inquiry. I cannot tell you how disappoin…”

“I can imagine, thank you.”

“Thank you, Baroness Casey. I want to ask about the national referral mechanism and its interplay here. You talk about the 49% increase in NRM referrals for sexual exploitation since 2020. The NRM is kind of broken right now. How useful a tool is it for addressing the challenges that you have seen in your audit? I want …”

“My final question is going back to the very beginning point about the spending review. There is a lot of new work for the Home Office here. Are you confident you have the resources to deliver on what we are committing to?”

“Thank you. The issue is, as we move slowly, there are still victims out there being abused. It is not about survivors actually; it is about current victims.”

“Another question. You talked about how important it is to collect ethnicity and race data, and you set out really comprehensively why that is the case, but I am thinking about other kinds of group child sexual exploitation that we have seen. There have been significant cases in the Catholic Church. In my city of Edinbu…”

“The crime we are discussing today is not just an historic crime; it is happening right now out in communities, and we are failing to protect the current victims of this awful child abuse. I welcome the new inquiry, but my concern is about delay. We have had plenty of inquiries, taskforces and reviews whose conclusions …”

“Does my hon. Friend agree that no recourse to public funds is a question not just of child poverty, but of deep poverty? NRPF children are significantly over-represented among those children in the UK who are in deep poverty—and those children are often either British themselves, as she said, or on an ineluctable pathw…”

“I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and I apologise that I was not present at the start of her speech. I understand what she says about children, but no recourse to public funds applies to people who arrive in this country to work or to contribute to the economy. Is she saying that anyone should be eligible to claim a…”

“I can understand how that is intended to be reassuring, but many difficulties that you encountered with the large sites were, from my perspective, completely envisageable. When you read the Northeye report, it should have been very obvious to the Home Office the problems they were going to encounter. Ms Rowland, your p…”

“That does make sense. I would like more information on that because, it does not quite tally with what we are hearing anecdotally, which makes it feel like the Home Office is not starting at the bottom and working back.”

“But we can expect the development assistance money to be rediverted towards development, as you put it.”

“We have touched on this next topic slightly before. I want to ask you about medium sites. This seems to be one of the Government’s new plans, moving on from the large sites that the previous Government had focused on. Why do you expect medium sites to succeed where large sites failed?”

“I want to come in on some of your points there, Mr Ridley, because what you are saying is very interesting. I do accept the Home Office was going through challenging situations at the time, but these contracts were huge even from the very beginning. There was always going to be massive amounts of public money going int…”

“Do you not think that in something as volatile as asylum, it is not a good idea for the Home Office to wait for things to stabilise before working out whether it is spending public money on something efficiently? Is that not a learning for the civil service here?”

“We talked about the system that we have set up over the last five years, but let us focus a little bit on the future of the asylum accommodation system. The Government have been clear that you want to end the use of asylum hotels. First, asylum fluctuates. Sometimes there are increases and sometimes there are not. It i…”

“I understand that, but I am thinking about the dynamics baked into these contracts. It seems to me that you have an incentive to say to these providers, because of cost more than anything, “We do not want you to use hotels”, but their revenue goes up when you use hotels, so they do not have a financial incentive. They …”

“That is positive to hear. That goes again to the structure of these contracts. If the money that had been spent over the last six years on these contracts had been invested in any kind of capital project or in any kind of local development, we would have something to show for it, but it has all gone on hotels and there…”

“If we had literally anything to show for it. Sticking on that point about contracts, people’s frustrations with these contracts are enormous. First, there is nothing to show for them. Secondly, we had riots in the summer targeting some of this accommodation. Also, the profits that these companies have made are huge. On…”

“That is very Delphic, Minister. The structure of the contracts is the issue I am trying to drive at here, and what the Home Office’s long-term thinking will be on this. The Home Office told the Public Accounts Committee in 2020 that it would need five years of planning time to radically change the asylum accommodation …”