Speeches by Pollard.

“I was not the Minister at the time.”

“I do not think I have—on taking office, I have had no correspondence that I can recall from Grant Shapps at all, and that is not one that I am aware of.”

“When we took over and were made aware of the super-injunction, it was our sense that we needed to continue the spirit of the super-injunction due to the risk that, at the time, was applied to the individuals on the dataset. To be honest, it was pretty unpalatable for me as a parliamentarian, especially as someone who h…”

“My assessment, broadly—without talking about individuals, because it is difficult for me to do so—is that I do not blame individual actions; I blame a system that was not set up to deliver the intended outcomes and was not comprehensive enough to access all the evidence and data that Defence held across our different s…”

“As I said, I will not be able to talk about individual judgments, but the Defence Secretary set it out in a statement to Parliament, when he talked about not the actions of individuals, but a system that was not delivering.”

“I don’t believe that was necessarily the case. What I do think is that the whole system was not set up to deliver the correct eligibility decisions. That is because the eligibility decisions were not able to access the correct information required for doing so. We know that from the Triples review, because during the r…”

“If it happened today and I was the Minister responsible, that would be a different thing, because I would have been in the room when those decisions were being taken. I am better able to comment on something that is happening today, rather than on something that happened when I was not the Minister and was not privy to…”

“That might be one for Dominic.”

“My message, very clearly, is that we will honour our obligation in full to eligible Afghans. This country, under both the previous Government and the current Government, has promised that we will honour that obligation. We have relocated 38,000 or so eligible Afghans to date, including key principal individuals and imm…”

“It is hard for me to comment on the actions of a particular individual, because I will not be able to talk about individuals and anything around special forces; the Committee will know that that is difficult for me as a Minister. Broadly, the Triples review was necessary, and it identified that decisions had been taken…”

“The written evidence is the Government’s position on this.”

“That is part of the reason why I instructed the introduction of KPIs. As a Minister who signs off letters to people chasing up casework, I did not feel it was acceptable that we were saying to people—especially those with complex cases who have been waiting many years for a decision—that they did not know where in the …”

“I suspect there was someone. That might be a question for Dominic. We would have to have kept a record of all those people who the super-injunction had been applied to, but that was not a long list that I was privy to—and nor was there a necessity for me to be.”

“Chair, to answer broadly, we have spent roughly £3.3 billion to date. Our estimate for completing this mission by 2029 is between £5.5 billion and £6 billion for total cross-Government spend, not just MOD spend. Clearly, a self-move has a different inherent baseline cost than a facilitated move. That may involve slight…”

“Largely the military bases that we have been phasing out and the Defence estate, but I receive regular updates from the hotels.”

“I am happy to look at what that information is to check if it is appropriate for us to publish and share it with you. I will check if it is the right classification. I am happy to take that away.”

“Some of the transitional accommodation, yes.”

“The process of bringing everyone together in the ARP, rather than having them separate, has been a success. We see improvements in outcomes, and the partnership arrangement that we piloted with local authorities—that was an MHCLG pilot that we are now rolling out and encouraging others to use—has been about sharing tha…”

“On the answer to the previous question, I would welcome a recommendation about how we capture more of this cross-Government. I think that work is ongoing, but clarity in the report would be welcome. That is the reason, as Dominic set out earlier, that we are deliberately holding our lessons-learned work until after the…”

“I will let Dominic talk about the broader exercise. We have put in place—as this Government rather than the previous Government—improvements to data protection, data handling and record keeping. That includes implementing new IT systems that would make it impossible to send entire datasets out from MOD systems. Previou…”