Speeches by Murray.

“Thank you. The issue is, as we move slowly, there are still victims out there being abused. It is not about survivors actually; it is about current victims.”

“My final question is going back to the very beginning point about the spending review. There is a lot of new work for the Home Office here. Are you confident you have the resources to deliver on what we are committing to?”

“I can imagine, thank you.”

“Absolutely. You mention in your report—”

“Another question. You talked about how important it is to collect ethnicity and race data, and you set out really comprehensively why that is the case, but I am thinking about other kinds of group child sexual exploitation that we have seen. There have been significant cases in the Catholic Church. In my city of Edinbu…”

“Thank you, Baroness Casey. I want to ask about the national referral mechanism and its interplay here. You talk about the 49% increase in NRM referrals for sexual exploitation since 2020. The NRM is kind of broken right now. How useful a tool is it for addressing the challenges that you have seen in your audit? I want …”

“Thank you for that. I have a couple other questions. First—this is a genuine question—one of the things that was missing from the report is any discussion of the pandemic and the huge impact that it had on child protection and the way in which abuse is perpetrated. Would you like to say anything about that?”

“First, I thank all three of you for the very important report that you have produced. I want to go back to the question of when you decided to call for a national inquiry. We had Alexis Jay and Tom Crowther here. You said that your own views evolved about the need for a national inquiry. I cannot tell you how disappoin…”

“The crime we are discussing today is not just an historic crime; it is happening right now out in communities, and we are failing to protect the current victims of this awful child abuse. I welcome the new inquiry, but my concern is about delay. We have had plenty of inquiries, taskforces and reviews whose conclusions …”

“I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and I apologise that I was not present at the start of her speech. I understand what she says about children, but no recourse to public funds applies to people who arrive in this country to work or to contribute to the economy. Is she saying that anyone should be eligible to claim a…”

“Does my hon. Friend agree that no recourse to public funds is a question not just of child poverty, but of deep poverty? NRPF children are significantly over-represented among those children in the UK who are in deep poverty—and those children are often either British themselves, as she said, or on an ineluctable pathw…”

“We have touched on this next topic slightly before. I want to ask you about medium sites. This seems to be one of the Government’s new plans, moving on from the large sites that the previous Government had focused on. Why do you expect medium sites to succeed where large sites failed?”

“But we can expect the development assistance money to be rediverted towards development, as you put it.”

“That does make sense. I would like more information on that because, it does not quite tally with what we are hearing anecdotally, which makes it feel like the Home Office is not starting at the bottom and working back.”

“When the providers appeared before us, they told us that safeguarding is not one of their key performance indicators with you in how you manage that contract, so are there any consequences for providers if they do not comply with safeguarding duties?”

“If we think about the experience with these three providers under the contract, when the previous Government tried to task them with setting up large sites, they failed spectacularly. The Northeye example—incredible levels of waste of public money. Are you sure that you have such a grip on the system that if you tasked…”

“I can understand how that is intended to be reassuring, but many difficulties that you encountered with the large sites were, from my perspective, completely envisageable. When you read the Northeye report, it should have been very obvious to the Home Office the problems they were going to encounter. Ms Rowland, your p…”

“Even still, I think that is a bit behind the scale.”

“Thank you for that. I want to follow up on the ODA point. You said, Minister, that there has been £500 million in savings, but only £74 million of that has gone back into the development assistance budget. Can you explain why?”

“Thank you. I have one final question. I would like to draw the Committee’s attention to my entry in the Register of Interests and declare the support my office received from RAMP. I should have done so at the beginning; forgive me, Chair. Before we move on from the question about large sites and the lessons learned fro…”