Speeches by Eagle.

“I see it regularly.”

“I was there when this happened, but—”

“That work has begun, and we are looking at some work on bridging contracts as well. We have been out to the market to look at how we might evolve. Joanna, I don’t know if you want to go into a little bit of detail about that.”

“Simon may have more detail, but my understanding is that the development assistance budget only applies to people who claim asylum in this country for the first 12 months. Various bits to do with the accounting for that are going on.”

“I would ask a more philosophical question than that, almost, which is: is a centralised system that runs like that the model?”

“There are other things, such as we are trying to operate temporary accommodation in a housing shortage situation where there is a great deal of pressure on it. There are financial and practical constraints of opening up new supply. You cannot overburden particular areas with dispersed accommodation, because there might…”

“In general, they do a good job in difficult circumstances. When I have talked to service users, I get that impression. However, if somebody has had a difficult time trying to contact them, they will have a different view. Trying to get through to the helpline, particularly for more complex assistance, has always been m…”

“We do require them to find us dispersed accommodation and other accommodations, and they are constantly on the search for such things. I often get approached by MPs who have heard rumours that various suppliers are looking at buildings in their areas and want to know about it. Some of that is literally just surveying t…”

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

“First, can I apologise for not writing to you? I will take that up with my office when I get back from here. That should have happened, so my apologies for that. Secondly, when these contracts were let by our processors, they were very overarching contracts, and we contract with the prime suppliers. You also have to re…”

“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.”

“We are trying to look cross-Government at this, because there is a shortage of temporary accommodation in other capacities as well. One thinks of the number of households who have been made temporarily homeless in local authority areas because of no-fault eviction, for example—all of them in bed and breakfast or expens…”

“I did not say that, but if one were going to say that no rooms had to be shared at all, you would double or treble the number of hotel rooms required overnight. What we are trying to do is get down the inordinate cost of the system we have at the moment. You do not do that by doubling the cost with one decision overnig…”

“The faster the system works, the more ODA savings will be made, if we make a saving. However, because we inherited such big backlogs of people who have been here a long time, when we speed the backlog up, those people have already gone out of eligibility for ODA money.”

“One of the issues with large sites was that they tended to be old MOD sites. I think Joanna has had a lot of experience trying to bring them on board and get them up to any kind of scratch when they had asbestos-filled buildings, poisoned land, unexploded ordinance and all those sorts of things on old army bases. A lot…”

“Every old or derelict site has its issues and problems. However, I think it will be cheaper to bring sites like that on board if you are closing hotels. We wish to work in collaboration with local authorities rather than against them, which has often happened in the past, where you get many issues with planning permiss…”

“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…”

“To be fair to civil servants in the Home Office, Mr Murray—again, I was not there at the time— there was a centralised push from a small ministerial group that was not in the Home Office only to provide large sites. I think that is detailed in the Northeye PAC report for all to read in all its glory. With all due respe…”

“I am glad you enjoyed your visit to Wethersfield. It has taken a while to establish and stabilise, and I do not think large sites are the answer to what we are trying to do elsewhere for some of the reasons that you have talked about—the complexity of trying to find usable sites, and not least because they are remote a…”