Speeches by Kane.

“Can I talk to you about the assessment of value for money? I know we have touched on it, and Oliver mentioned it in his questions. First-of-a-kind projects make it very difficult to judge value for money, but you have said that the projects will be subject to an assessment of value for money. You are now moving forward…”

“Thank you. How are you weighting your five targets in relation to, for example, the first one, which we have had this week? How are you approaching the weighting of these five criteria?”

“Everybody goes on about value for money, whether we are investing in the right places and whether we should be taking this money and putting in offshore wind and other things. You come back with, “We have to do this. This is part of the mix.” How are you ensuring that this money, particularly in this area of the indust…”

“Can you speak to the knock-on effect on the expansion and the track 2 projects? What are you thinking for the timeline, based on where we are after this week’s announcement?”

“I was going to ask more about where you are in developing the oversight and how it is going, but I wonder if it might be better as a note. Do you want me to ask about that now, Chair?”

“You now have the first contract, and you have said that you are “developing” departmental oversight. Where are you in that process?”

“But whether it is a separate business case or a chapter in the bigger business case, the work still needs to be done. Is it going to be done now? You still have the site, and you are going to have to decide how to get the best value for it.”

“From the Report, you sought, but were not granted, an exemption from complying with the standard approval of the acquisition by the Office of Government Property within the Cabinet Office. Following its review in 2023, the Cabinet Office highlighted to the Minister for Immigration significant risks with the acquisition…”

“You went ahead with the purchase the following day. I am just wondering—this may be a mindset question—why you assured the Cabinet Office, which approves Government property purchases, that you could manage the risks when you did not fully understand what they were.”

“There seems to be an awful lot of voices in this process who are giving you warnings—you are hearing the warnings throughout. Today, you are saying that hindsight is giving you more warnings, which you are incorporating into procedures. What are you going to do to ensure that you do not ignore those voices in the futur…”

“In a hypothetical future purchase, if you follow all of your procedures, there will be a timescale attached to it. In the future, if you are pushed to operate at a pace greater than you can achieve by following all of the procedures as they are laid out, you will then face a choice: to ignore or bypass some of them as …”

“Moving on to the business case for the purchase of the site: that was a condition of the Treasury’s approval for purchase, but you did not do one. Why did you not do one?”

“So there is a business case that exists—”

“When you say a draft, are we talking a first draft or a final draft?”

“So the decision not to proceed from the outline business case to the full business case was based on the idea that you could not get it done in time. It was to do with the timings; it was not that you saw anything alarming in the outline business case.”

“Where do business cases feed into your thinking generally? It strikes me that if the decision not to proceed to the full business case was to do with pace, you could have done the process concurrently. You wouldn’t have had to say, “Don’t do it.” You could have said, “We’re going to proceed at pace, but could someone p…”

“I suppose the question I am asking you is this. You now have a site, and you have decided that you are either going to sell it or see whether another Department wants it. There is still a business case to be done for that endeavour. You are still going to have to make sure you do that, so is a business case being worke…”

“Talk to me about the timescales. How long will it sit on this register before you then say, “Well, no one wants it. Let’s move to sale”?”

“Okay. It sits there for eight weeks, and then you will take a period of time to come up with a proper disposal case—a business case.”

“Sorry to keep on at this. In terms of moving at pace to dispose of it, how do you ensure that you are not pushed to dispose of it quickly and therefore not realise the best value? How will you make that judgment call about timings versus value for disposing of the asset?”