Speeches by Lowe.

“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I will indeed write to the Committee. I have one final question for the Minister: what else is the Home Office lying about?”

“Will the Minister now commit to publishing these figures on a regular and transparent basis, or will I have to continue exposing this? Further whistleblowers have already come forward with additional information, and I thank them for that. My warning to the Home Office and to other Departments is this: be very careful …”

“I can count, thank you. Why did the Minister mislead the British people? Who is being sacked?”

“My questions are these. Where are they now? What is the Minister doing to detain them? Where did they come from? What are their convictions? How has this been allowed to happen?”

“I do agree with the hon. Member’s helpful intervention. Unvetted and unknown men—sex pests, misogynists, and even far worse—are in our communities, on our streets and near our schools, in the thousands and thousands. This is a national security emergency and must be treated as such. The evidence is undeniable. I have s…”

“I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, and I will come to that point in a minute, but I completely concur. To recap, I asked the Home Office “what information the Department holds on the number of irregular migrants defined as absconders.” A Minister replied: “The requested data is not readily accessible from p…”

“I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his helpful intervention.”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable I feel sitting on the Government side of the Chamber, but I could not find a spare seat anywhere else, which is a testament to the fact that this subject is contested extremely passionately and that arguably it needs to b…”

“You say zero to £60 million. It cannot be zero.”

“Having read all this material, it seems to me that official DWP calculation errors are causing nearly as much loss as claimant errors. Why does the Department persist in framing the problem as primarily the claimant, rather than acknowledging serious failings within the DWP? That seemed to me to be a question. After 37…”

“Listening to your answers, which have been very enlightening, I think I am right in saying that the DWP is ramping up surveillance of claimants and issuing sanctions at record levels now. How does that explain the Department simultaneously losing £7.4 billion to fraud in 2023-24? Does that not play to serious issues wi…”

“As a matter of interest—you know this better than I do—is there a problem with the advance payments within universal credit? As a matter of interest, the advance payments seem to be the source of a lot of abuse. Would greater sanctions for those abusing the system, such as removal from any welfare payments if they abus…”

“I just had one question in response to the answer on advance payments. One of my colleagues was going to ask a question, but they are not here.”

“In 2023-24, I think I am right in saying that £934 million in UC advances was recovered. You have not published how much was actually lost in UC advances. Will you commit to publishing that? It might be quite useful.”

“People who work within the DWP are telling me that it is a big problem. You are telling us that it is not a big problem. The people who work on the frontline think it is a huge problem.”

“Yes.”

“There was a Bulgarian whistleblower, according to the media.”

“That is how they reported it.”

“Given that you are, from reading the documents, keen to increase the amount of community sentences through tagging to take the pressure off the prisons, you have to get this tagging right and the contracts need to be fit for purpose. Has that been addressed? The next time you come here, will it all be running on rails?”

“Why are you not tagging the prisoners when they leave prison, which you are not doing?”