Speeches by Eagle.

“Non-performance-related issues.”

“This financial year.”

“I see it regularly.”

“We are doing the work to check that their figures are accurate. There may be less; there may be more. That is why we have appointed independent auditors to check this, so that, when the profit shares are decided and agreed upon, they are accurate. We are not taking them at their precise word in this context; we are doi…”

“I think that, necessarily, given the shape of the contracts that we have inherited, where we have a prime relationship with a large provider that then subcontracts all the way down to either hotel or dispersed accommodation, it is quite difficult to get a proper handle on what is going on in every instance. Certainly, …”

“No.”

“If you look at the number before the election, there was a 70% drop in the number of initial decisions taken. It was illegal to process anyone who had arrived in the country after March 2023, and they were just piling up because they kept on coming. Therefore, we were having to deal with just a system that was paralyse…”

“This is the second audit, Mr Davies, of these contracts. There was one in 2021, I understand.”

“My understanding is that the way that it works is that they have to look across three or four years to check on what has been going on forensically with the audit, and that moneys have not been switched or changed around. We are using independent auditors to interrogate the information that we have been given, to check…”

“It will go back to where it belongs, and they will decide what to do with it.”

“I tend to get a report on that weekly.”

“Inspections have doubled as well. There is much more focus on these day-to-day elements of running contracts.”

“My understanding is that the forensic auditors will give us their information. We will check what they are saying, and any other questions we will put to providers and a final amount will be settled upon. I do not know whether the providers gave you the information of the moneys that they are expecting, but we cannot c…”

“No, not in public, I am afraid, at the moment. Sorry to be so opaque.”

“I would like to have much more transparency. I would like to have a different way of trying to deliver at the very local level in ways that are more accountable—rather than commercially accountable, more democratically accountable. That is why as soon as I came into this job, I got hold of the Local Government Associat…”

“Then there is also the assurance and inspections, and they have gone up a lot in the last few months as we have managed to focus more on actually managing the contracts by stabilising the system, moving away from all of the distractions that the previous regime managed to create about large sites in Rwanda. It just ena…”

“Certainly, halfway through a contract, with contracts that are as long as these, you would want to start looking at the KPI regime. I have never come across contracts that have managed to subsist while all around them has changed so dramatically. The entire world in 2019 was very different to the one that emerged from …”

“Let me have a look at the specific parliamentary question you asked and write to you about the context and tell you what we can provide you with.”

“Of course, they are in the contracts, so there are two issues really. What might we want to do better in future in a different circumstance, and what might we do with the contracts that we are involved in at the momen?. There are learnings for both of those contexts, I think.”

“It is a pity they were not able to give you evidence today. I assume you will call them back in. The Migrant Help contract was transformed from when it was previously let under our predecessors. It was completely different because, again, it went through the covid pandemic and the increase in numbers and usage. The num…”