Speeches by Eagle.

“Our aim is to close asylum hotels and get out of what we feel is an unsustainable situation as quickly as practicable.”

“We do not believe that it is sustainable to keep hotel use indefinitely, and we are working to close hotels.”

“No.”

“That certainly should not be happening. If my hon. Friend wants to talk to me about it, I will try to see what happened in that instance.”

“I will write to the hon. Gentleman.”

“I believe that people need to think about the language they use and the impressions of human beings they give when they talk about this very emotive issue. It raises huge concern, I know. As a Government, we have certainly got to do all we can to try to reassure people that we can get this system back under control, af…”

“I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman raises that issue with the Chancellor.”

“It is clearly important that overseas development moneys are used to try to prevent the flows of people that have been the result of collapses in various countries. We in the Home Office will do all we can to minimise the spend that we currently take from the overseas development aid budget.”

“We have put more resource into Europol to co-operate with European partners across borders. Operationally, we are working across Europe; we have a new agreement with the German Government and an agreement on sanctions and illicit finance with the Italian Government, and the Calais Group has met in London. We are doing …”

“I agree with my hon. Friend.”

“Mr Deputy Speaker—sorry, Mr Speaker. I do not know why I am calling you Mr Deputy Speaker today; I have gone back a very long time to when you were, but that was so long ago that I can scarcely remember it. My apologies, Mr Speaker. The right hon. Lady should remember that the Rwanda scheme was about deporting people f…”

“If my hon. and learned Friend wants to talk to me about any of the details, I would be happy to listen, but of course we want to operate that site properly and appropriately until we hand it back to the Ministry of Defence in September.”

“I am not going to comment on leaks.”

“Yes. Of course, we have to crack down on abuse of our asylum system, but also on the exploitation of vulnerable and desperate people by vicious criminal gangs.”

“The right hon. Gentleman says that Wethersfield is now getting more people, but it is still not holding the numbers that his Government planned for it to hold when it was opened, so that is rather an odd argument for him to make. If he was serious about reducing the problems at our borders, I would have thought that he…”

“My hon. Friend is correct that the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which has been through Committee and is awaiting its Report stage, will create counter-terror-style powers that will help us prevent some of these crossings and disrupt the sophisticated criminal smuggling gangs that were allowed to take h…”

“Those asylum seekers who have not had their claims processed within a year through no fault of their own are allowed access to work. I am unconvinced that allowing access to work earlier would do anything other than create more demand for people to come here.”

“I want to get out of hotels as quickly as is feasible. I will not name particular dates, because that is a pointless thing to do. We have to get through the appeals system and the first asylum processing system so that we can move people through the system much more quickly. We also need to continue our work on ramping…”

“I certainly agree with the hon. Lady that the shadow Home Secretary sounds like a broken record; we are well used to him running that argument in this place. I also agree that the key to dealing with hotels is to get the system back up and running from the chaos that it was in. I can tell the hon. Lady that asylum proc…”

“We inherited a system in chaos and a series of asylum contracts worth billions of pounds that were 10 years long, with a break clause in 2026, so we are looking seriously at what we can do to get better value for public money in those contracts. The action on Stay Belvedere Hotels Ltd is one example of the work we are …”