Speeches by Eagle.

“They are, but they have been changed to be more realistic.”

“Non-performance-related issues.”

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

“No.”

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

“It would be the vast majority.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“I can assure you that the targets to try to deal with the legacy backlog that we inherited in initial decision-making are being met and surpassed, and there is an implicit benefit in ODA expenditure in that target. I do not think much more would be achieved by having a separate target for essentially the same thing.”

“I think they are implied by the targeting that we are doing to get asylum decision-making going as fast as possible and get those initial decisions made. We started that off by ending retrospection with the Illegal Migration Act so that we could begin to process those applications. We had a 116% increase in initial app…”

“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…”

“We are happy to do that.”

“This is back in 2020-21 and I do not think any of us were there then, but we are happy to go back, investigate and get back to you.”

“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, …”

“We are shortening the time that it takes to process asylum claims by getting the system that we inherited from the Conservatives working again. That is why there has been a 63% increase in the number of initial claims processed. That follows a 70% fall in the period before the last election.”

“When people arrive and claim to be children, there are tests at the border to check whether we think they are children. If they are accepted as children, they are put into local authority care, so they should not be in asylum accommodation at all. If they are seen to be adults and end up in asylum accommodation, they c…”

“There is an amendment to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill that extends the requirement to check illegal working to the gig economy, the zero-hours economy and all those areas that have non-traditional employer-employee relationships. I look forward to being able to operationalise that when the Bill beco…”

“We are tackling illegal working by significantly increasing enforcement. That is why we have had a 40% increase in visits and a 42% increase in the number of arrests for illegal working. There are fines of £60,000 per illegal worker discovered, and those who are discovered working illegally can be arrested and put on t…”

“I am reeling at the New Labour point that the Father of the House has made. E-visas basically give us the capacity to do a similar thing, and they are easily checked, which is why, in the border security Bill, we are extending those checks to the gig and zero-hours economy.”

“To tackle illegal migration, we must work across borders in co-operation with other jurisdictions. Were we to leave the European convention on human rights, we could not work with those that sign up to it.”