Speeches by Murray.

“You hold the asylum contract for London. The number for dispersal accommodation in London since September 2025 has gone down. How are you expanding it if it is going down in London?”

“You said you were halfway through it.”

“Why can you not answer that question?”

“I want to ask one final question, picking up on your answer to Robbie Moore earlier. You said that one benefit of large sites is essentially community cohesion, even if it is not cost. It is not the hotel in the city centre that everyone recognises. First, you have just said it is a 97,500-person estate, we are talking…”

“My question is not whether you believed it or not or whether you think that was fair. It was 70%. My question is, when the Home Office inspects you now, having put in place all these new processes, what percentage of the time does it think potentially you have breached a KPI?”

“You are being held to account for the KPIs, and so it is a question for you. Is it still 70%?”

“Could I ask you a question following on from our previous session with Clearsprings? Hopefully you and your officials have had a forewarning of this, so you could anticipate it. We know that Clearsprings self-report 0% of the time that they failed one of their KPIs, but when your officials went and inspected, they foun…”

“It is interesting that you are talking about the pull factors of the asylum system, and I understand the argument you are making. What sources of evidence are you using for that? What is the intellectual structure of that analysis?”

“I am not sure it is. My question was: how many times does the Home Office think you have broken a KPI when it inspects you now?”

“How has that gone down since you have instituted these new systems?”

“Is it improving or not?”

“Can I just pick up on this point about meeting your KPIs and the systems that you are putting in place to improve it? We know that previously you had never reported to the Home Office that you had broken your KPIs but, when the Home Office inspected your hotel accommodation, it found that 70% of the time it thought you…”

“When you went to Wethersfield, it ended up costing an extra £150 million more than you had told the Home Office at the beginning. How much do you anticipate this costing the Home Office more?”

“Minister, that was not quite the question I asked. My question was, are they improving, not are you satisfied? You may be satisfied, but this Committee is not, and that is what all our reports do. Our question is not, are you satisfied? The question is, are they improving? Have you seen data that the KPIs organised by …”

“How much have your profits gone down by? Have they gone down by half as well?”

“You are charging the Home Office about half.”

“You are not curious?”

“We know that the average for a hotel is £145 a night, and we know that the average for Wethersfield, the other site that you run, is £132. Do you anticipate that this model of providing asylum accommodation will lead to any savings in cost for the taxpayer?”

“I am not following what is unknown.”

“Not curious enough to ask?”