Speeches by Murray.

“To be clear, I mean outside the Home Office.”

“Is “independent” not a key word in your title?”

“If you need clarification, you accept there is a lack of clarity at the moment. Should the operating model that you have just described also apply to other chief inspectors? For example, if the chief inspector of constabulary sees police brutality, should they get clearance from Home Office Ministers before they tell t…”

“You have no view on that.”

“Let us go in order of importance.”

“If it is about competence, not willingness, why do you maintain the conversation between you and the director general and not go public?”

“The discussion was about whether you would ever go public, and you used the example of a director general. I asked, “What if you found that they were not competent to implement your recommendations?” Would you still keep the recommendation in a report and go public with it?”

“Can I ask a final question about stakeholders? In the first six months to a year of being in post, who would you identify as the key stakeholders for the chief inspector and how would you go about building those relationships?”

“It is interesting to me that the two groups that were absent from that list were anyone political, so No. 10, the Home Affairs Committee and the House of Commons were not mentioned in that, and anyone media or representing the public. That could be the wider press, trade unions or anything like that. Was that a deliber…”

“What would you do if there were tensions between those stakeholders?”

“That was my question, exactly.”

“The public would expect you to act independently of the interests of Ministers. If you saw something such as serious immigration crime or drug smuggling through the border and Ministers refused to do anything about that, would it not ultimately harm the office of the ICIBI and all your staff, who are on the frontline i…”

“Can I follow up on that very quickly? If you want to work with the Home Office in advance of publishing the recommendations on their implementability to ensure that they are all implemented, is the risk that the Home Office will only agree to things that it was already going to do anyway? How are you ever going to push…”

“Why keep that conversation internal? If you publish it, we can see and then the rest of society and our constituents can hold us to account for it not happening. A conversation between you and a DG is not the most robust way of ensuring that the Home Office changes, surely, given the huge ecosystem that exists around t…”

“This is politics.”

“I understand the point about all working towards the same broad objectives, but what if the obstacle is competence? What if the obstacle is that the Home Office is not competently achieving it? What if the willingness is there, but not the capacity?”

“Of course, the issue is that Scotland is not the same everywhere. My community in Edinburgh and East Lothian is seeing its population grow, while other parts are seeing their population decline. The reason is Scotland’s labour market and economy. Even when we had access to 300 million people as an EU member, with net m…”

“rose—”

“I am pleased we are having this debate today, as the measures proposed in the Bill are long, long overdue. Anyone can see that confidence in the immigration and border security system broke down under the previous Government, when hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was wasted on hare-brained schemes, te…”

“Let us be clear: Palestinian land belongs to the Palestinians, and any implication that they should be forced from it should be unequivocally condemned. Individual Palestinians are routinely forced from their land by illegal settlement building in the west bank. Will the Minister join me in unequivocally condemning ill…”