Speeches by Murray.

“Thanks for coming in. Mr Lakey, when you were here before, you told us that your company was able to extract higher profits from accommodating someone in a hotel than in dispersal accommodation. What is the cost per night per asylum seeker that you are currently charging the Home Office for this large site?”

“No, for Crowborough.”

“The whole project.”

“Does that mean—I am trying to do a quick calculation in my head—it will be more expensive than hotels per person? It definitely is.”

“What was the contracting process for tendering it to Clearsprings? Did it go to an open tender?”

“You did not do any process of establishing a competitive tender process to see if another provider could produce it for less cost?”

“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?”

“Okay. This is a question we asked Clearsprings, who could not answer it. What is the total cost of Crowborough to the Home Office?”

“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…”

“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…”

“When the previous Permanent Secretary came to us several months ago, she told us she had launched a review into management capacity for contracts and that she had recruited 336 full-time staff to work in contracts. What is the outcome of that review and what impact has it had?”

“Are they improving or not?”

“I am talking about the specific KPIs you put in the contracts to judge whether these huge companies that are extracting hundreds of millions of pounds of profit on a very controversial public procurement contract, and we hear a lot from the third sector, from the asylum seekers themselves, that there are massive failin…”

“No, no, no, not the crucial KPIs, all KPIs. Key performance indicators, so they are all key. Are they improving across all the KPIs?”

“What pilots are taking place to develop that capacity? What examples have you seen where you think that would be a route to go on? What options have officials given you that would be an alternative? Give us some more detail.”

“You will be aware from reading the National Audit Office reports into Home Office failures that one of the problems in the Home Office is everyone says, “We will learn lessons”, and nobody ever does. It does feel like you are slipping back into that pattern again.”

“Okay, but we know that the Home Office has a poor track record when it comes to large sites. Wethersfield, which we visited—and I accept this was not on your watch but was done by the previous Government—was supposed to cost £5 million and ended up costing £45 million to set up. Scampton went from £5 million to £27 mil…”

“You are not curious?”

“Okay. That is positive to hear, because I agree that we should be looking in exactly that direction. I suppose my question is, we are two years into this Government, and the break clause has been coming for five years. How advanced are those discussions getting? I tell you what my concern is: we know it is easier for t…”

“Thank you, Minister. The asylum system that we have in the UK is, clearly, terrible for local communities and terrible for asylum seekers, and I accept you inherited it, but it is also terrible for the taxpayer. The National Audit Office has estimated the 10-year asylum contract to have gone from £4 billion to £15 bill…”