Speeches by Eagle.

“I do not know whether colleagues might have more detailed information.”

“No.”

“It hasn’t gone down. That is the cost to date, and there is still three and a half years more to run on the contract. The NAO got slightly the wrong end of the stick on that one. We are expecting the value of the contract to be higher.”

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

“Non-performance-related issues.”

“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, …”

“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.”

“I was about to comment on how much the landscape changed from when these contracts were first let out, because they did not involve hotels at all. Certainly, talking to colleagues in the Home Office after the hotels reached their peak in 2023, the Home Office was then in this kind of 10-point plan frenzy of trying to m…”

“Which part of the contract are you referring to and when?”

“It would be the vast majority.”

“That is very much my view. Trying to have an asset at the end of this that could be used for temporary accommodation if such needs arise again would be a better use of public money.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, higher than when it was first set, for understandable reasons.”

“We became aware of problems in relation to Stay Belvedere Hotels Ltd at the beginning of this year, and we became aware of performance issues—non-performance-related issues, I should say—with that chain. They provided 51 hotels to the portfolio that Clearsprings had, and we made it clear, following information that we …”

“There are obligations with respect to this. Clearly, if there is a child who turns up mistakenly in adult accommodation and they claim they are a child when they get there, the local authority must be contacted, and the local authority will do what is known as a Merton assessment. We do not knowingly disperse children …”

“We inherited this situation as we inherited the contracts that you are looking into over a 10-year period. These contracts were let in 2019 when the context was quite different to the one that we are working in now. I do not want to speak for the people that let the contracts particularly, but we do know that the overa…”

“They can go to the accommodation provider and say, “I am a child”, and if they do that then the accommodation provider for safeguarding reasons would contact the local authority.”

“Clearly, scientific age assessment and/or photographic age verification is a very important part of what we are trying to develop, so that we can have more of an assurance particularly on the cusp of child and adult when people come to us with no ID and claim that they are children. There are safeguarding issues either…”