Speeches by Pollard.

“Against this, not everyone has responded so far. We also know that within the cohort of eligible people, there is a cohort of people who I think we call non-progressives, in terms of not moving forward in the chain, who we have granted eligibility to but who are no longer corresponding with the Ministry of Defence. We …”

“As with all decisions on ARAP schemes, it would be made by me initially, and large decisions would then also be taken by the Secretary of State. Both John and I have made this decision to move to self-move, based on the assessment and recommendations of the teams working in this space. That partly reflects the reality …”

“I would like us to be delivering against every KPI, but we are not yet there on all of them. One of the reasons why I feel strongly about us publishing them is that we should be honest about performance against them. That is one of the reasons we have instructed that there should be additional resource applied to the c…”

“We published the KPIs, and the data is now aligned with the Home Office immigration publication, which I do not think is many days away in terms of the next set being published. Against all of those we are prioritising the principal applicants. We are performing better against principal applicants than we perhaps are a…”

“I will look at—”

“I was going to give you the answer to that question, but give it a go.”

“That is probably a “me” question, rather than a “Ben” question. We will publish the KPIs; it is one of the key parts of the instruction that I have given that we should be transparent about the performance—it is not where I would like it to be, but it is a lot better than we inherited in July ’24. That is designed to s…”

“Absolutely. And I am happy to provide some narrative—”

“We are not varying the KPIs. That is one of the reasons we have added the additional resourcing that Dominic mentioned—the additional caseworkers. I wanted to be clear about the expectation that people should have about how many we can process in the time. If we are not hitting those KPIs in what we felt was a reasonab…”

“On the answer to the previous question, I would welcome a recommendation about how we capture more of this cross-Government. I think that work is ongoing, but clarity in the report would be welcome. That is the reason, as Dominic set out earlier, that we are deliberately holding our lessons-learned work until after the…”

“Much of that information is held by other Government Departments, so we can see how that is going. The Home Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and their partners are responsible for that integration work. However, let’s see if we can collate some of that together, because there are powerf…”

“Some of the transitional accommodation, yes.”

“Largely the military bases that we have been phasing out and the Defence estate, but I receive regular updates from the hotels.”

“I was not the Minister at the time.”

“I am not going to comment on hypotheticals, and you would not expect me to do such a thing. I have seen no evidence to suggest that that is the case. If evidence subsequently emerges, of course we will look at it, but I cannot see that evidence from where I sit today. I can see evidence of a system that is not working.…”

“I am happy for Dominic to come in on how we manage risk. The distinction that I would make, as the Minister responsible for it since July ’24, is different from the accountability of the Ministers and officials who were in charge of the scheme at the point of Op PITTING, the initial data breach, and the setting up of A…”

“Certainly, record keeping has improved considerably across defence in recent years. However, on the specific details, I am happy to write to the Committee.”

“My sense is that we have, yes. However, to answer your question fully and give you confidence on that, I will write to the Committee with the details, as per the Chair’s instruction earlier. We are not anticipating having operations in the same way as we have had in Afghanistan. However, we do work with partner forces …”

“I will turn to Dominic to give some of the detailed recommendations, but broadly it was apparent for those who were following the Triples over a number of years—before the Triples review started—that the data required to demonstrate that the Triples had indeed worked alongside UK forces in Afghanistan was not being cor…”

“The handling of the Triples is something that I have been incredibly vocal and critical about, including in opposition, and that is why, upon taking office, we continued the Triples review announced to the House by my predecessor, James Heappey. It was reassuring that one reason that that was announced was the pressure…”