Asylum and Migration

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

Let me start by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate.

I think we can all agree that it is an important and vital job for Parliament to scrutinise Government spending in general, and in this particular case the Home Office budget for the purposes of asylum and migration—an issue that I know every Member of the House cares about, and one that the public are rightly concerned about as well. Over the past five years, the Home Office’s asylum support, resettlement and accommodation budget has increased by 733%, which represents a quarter of the Department’s total expenditure.

It is, of course, the Home Office’s responsibility to enable scrutiny to take place with the timely provision of clear and transparent information, but the Home Affairs Committee has been repeatedly hamstrung by its refusal to disclose key details of its spending plans and commitments. We have had to ask for information repeatedly, and on several occasions we have worked with the Public Accounts Committee to obtain financial details which I believe should have been readily available to us.

As the House will know, the terms of reference for the Home Affairs Committee are to examine

“the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Home Office and its associated public bodies.”

We do that, of course, on behalf of the House of Commons as a whole. Ministers should not need to be reminded that parliamentary scrutiny is not a disposable luxury. The Home Office says that it welcomes scrutiny, but unfortunately we have not found that to be the reality. I would argue that scrutiny is a basic necessity to ensure that public money is spent well, appropriately and wisely, but time and again our demands for financial transparency have been rebuffed by the Department, keeping Parliament and therefore the public in the dark about how it is spending billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. Members of the House have therefore not been able to ask crucial questions about spending plans until long after the money has left the Government coffers. Today’s debate will shine a light on the position of the Home Office, and highlight the urgent need for Ministers to change their approach to being scrutinised.

I will set out the current position of the Home Office. It has requested £5.9 billion in additional funding through the supplementary estimates—£4 billion for asylum, £1.2 billion for the implementation of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the 10-point plan, and £0.5 billion for the Afghan resettlement schemes. I turn first to the Home Office’s spending on the asylum system. In publishing and setting out its plans on asylum for the year, the Department has not disclosed its spending plans and commitments in a timely manner, preventing full and proper parliamentary scrutiny. What seems to have happened is that the Home Office, in agreement with the Treasury, completely omitted a significant proportion of expected asylum expenditure from its main estimates. This means that Parliament will not get to scrutinise the Department’s spending plans until after the money has been spent.

The Department is now seeking retrospective approval at the supplementary estimates stage, which goes against the principles of the estimates approval process. Given all the sophisticated modelling that it has at its disposal, I question why the Home Office was not in a position to make available at least a notional figure to put into its budget, which would have needed to increase if necessary. It is wrong that nothing was put in the budget at the start. On 1 February this year, the Home Secretary requested an emergency drawdown of £2.6 billion from the reserves, because the Department had run out of money before the supplementary estimates had been approved.

Further, the level of detail provided on asylum spending in the supplementary estimates is inadequate. A much more detailed breakdown of the asylum budget is required to fully understand the cost drivers and to hold the Department to account for the decisions it is taking. Sadly, that is not what we have been given. Expenditure on asylum has increased rapidly over the past two years. We know that levels of migration have increased due to the number of small boat crossings, the war in Ukraine and the Afghan resettlement schemes, and the departmental settlement in the 2021 spending review was insufficient to cope with the growing pressures. As such, the Department has made large claims on the reserves, as well as extending its use of the official development assistance budget.

Some pressures on the Home Office’s budget are beyond the Department’s immediate control, but others are not. For example, it is down to the Department to decide how it delivers accommodation for asylum seekers. The Home Affairs Committee is very concerned that the former chief inspector of borders and immigration has said that the Home Office did not appear to have an asylum accommodation strategy. Of course, the use of hotel accommodation is due to the backlog—or, as the Home Secretary corrected me at the Home Affairs Committee, the “queue”. It is apparently not a backlog anymore, but a queue. The queue has been allowed to develop because of the failure of the Home Office to invest in processing asylum claims in an efficient way over a number of years. That has resulted in a much larger bill for accommodation, which we are now having to deal with.

We know that the Home Office is currently spending £8 million a day on accommodating asylum seekers in hotels, which amounts to £2.9 billion a year. Despite the Home Office spending a huge amount, it is not predominantly the Department’s money, because the first 12 months of an asylum seeker’s accommodation is funded through the official development assistance budget. Between 2021-22 and 2023-24, Home Office usage of the ODA budget increased by 226%, from £981 million to £3.2 billion. That forced the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to cease all non-essential programmes, as spending was redirected domestically. The implications have been heavily criticised by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact and the International Development Committee.

Also, the Illegal Migration Act, if implemented in full, will restrict the Home Office’s ability to use the official development assistance budget for asylum seekers, as migrants arriving irregularly will no longer be able to seek asylum.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

The right hon. Lady is making an important point about the use of ODA. Does she agree that nothing is forcing the Government to spend ODA in that way? Even if the expenditure has to be counted as ODA, they could make up for it in the FCDO budget. The Government have made a choice to take money away from the FCDO and spend it via the Home Office.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that this is a Government choice. Does the Minister think that spending £3.2 billion on asylum accommodation in the UK is an appropriate use of the ODA budget? What does he say about the FCDO having to cease all its non-essential programmes, which could be important to ensuring that people stay in their home country, rather than feeling that they have to become a migrant? Does he have a plan for how the Home Office will fund asylum accommodation if it can no longer take money from the ODA budget?

One of the Home Office’s alternative approaches to accommodating some asylum seekers—a maximum of around 500 at a time—is the Bibby Stockholm barge. In January 2024, the Home Office’s permanent secretary informed the Home Affairs Committee that it costs £120 a night to accommodate a man on the Bibby Stockholm, as compared with £140 a night in a hotel. That figure is based on full occupancy, but the barge was not fully occupied when we visited in January, and we were led to believe that it will never reach its full capacity of 500. We are also aware that the initial figure did not include the barge’s set-up costs, which amounted to around £22 million. The permanent secretary assured us that when set-up costs were included,

“there is a total-life saving from use of the Bibby Stockholm of £800,000.”

However, we understand that the contract for the barge is for only 18 months. Can the Minister say over what period the total-life saving is calculated? At what level of occupancy does the Bibby Stockholm cease to be value for money? What figures has the average cost per person per night fluctuated between over the past year?

We put all these questions to the permanent secretary, and I am aware that the National Audit Office is conducting a value-for-money audit of asylum accommodation, which will not be published until 22 March. In recent oral evidence sessions with Ministers, the Home Affairs Committee has repeatedly asked about the finances of the Bibby Stockholm and other asylum accommodation sites, but sadly with few meaningful replies.

What specifically is driving the capital budget increase in asylum costs? In the Home Office’s proposal, the capital departmental expenditure limit budget will go up to £1,399,800,000—an increase of £468.5 million. That is a more than 50% increase on the initial budget of £931.3 million. Is that due to the Prime Minister’s announcement in June 2023 that two other barges had been procured, in addition to the Bibby Stockholm—there is no explicit reference to that in the estimates memorandum —or is it for the additional detention facilities required under the Illegal Migration Act?

Secondly, why did the cost of processing an asylum claim go from £9,000 in 2019 to £21,000 in 2022-23? That is a real-terms increase of 109%.

Again, Home Office spending on the UK-Rwanda partnership is a familiar story. The Home Affairs Committee has finally been able to glean that large sums of money have been committed to this scheme, but largely via retrospective disclosures and an accidental leak in an International Monetary Fund board paper in Rwanda. The Committee has, once again, had to join forces with the Public Accounts Committee to ask the National Audit Office to find out the costings of the scheme. I reiterate that it is very unsatisfactory that when we have been holding our normal scrutiny sessions with Ministers and officials to try to get detail on spending and any further commitments, we have repeatedly been met with silence from Ministers and been told to wait until the accounts for the Department are published at the end of the financial year.

Let us be clear: the failure to respond to our requests is not because anyone behind the scenes has judged the value-for-money test of this policy to be so overwhelmingly watertight that disclosures to Parliament are completely unnecessary, unsatisfactory as that would be. On the contrary, the permanent secretary required a ministerial direction in April 2022 to start implementation of the Rwanda partnership, because he judged that there was insufficient evidence of the deterrent effect that had been suggested, and therefore of the scheme being value for money. That ministerial direction has not been revoked, and it is in force today, with even more money being committed to this scheme. As the Institute for Government points out, permanent secretaries have a duty to seek a ministerial direction if they think a spending proposal breaches the value-for-money criteria—that is,

“if something else, or doing nothing, would be cheaper and better”.

That makes it even more important that Parliament can scrutinise this scheme and have the full costs available.

Less than two weeks ago, we learned, via the National Audit Office investigation that the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and I had sought, that the UK Government have committed to making payments to cover asylum processing and operational costs, and an integration package, for each individual relocated to Rwanda, and that these payments can last for five years and total £150,874 per person. Ministers had previously indicated that the per-person payments in the Rwanda scheme would be similar to the per-person cost of processing claims in the UK. Asked at the Home Affairs Committee what the UK processing cost was, the then Minister responsible for illegal migration said that it was £12,000, although we now know that it is £21,000.

Here is what else we have learned: the Home Office has committed to pay the Rwandan Government £370 million under the economic transformation and integration fund. It will also pay an additional £20,000 per individual relocated, and a further £120 million once 300 people have been relocated. That is in addition to the £150,874 per person for asylum processing and operational costs. On top of that, we also have the direct costs incurred by the Home Office in managing and overseeing the scheme and transporting people to Rwanda. As of February 2024, the Home Office had incurred costs of £20 million, which it expects to rise to £28 million by the end of 2023-24. The Home Office estimates that it will incur further costs of approximately £1 million per year in staff costs and £11,000 per individual for flight costs. It would be helpful if the Minister could let the House know whether he now has an airline available to remove people to Rwanda, because that is another question to which we have not been able to get an answer.

The Home Office will also incur costs to escort individuals to Rwanda, including training costs of £12.6 million in 2024-2025 and £1 million per year thereafter in fixed costs, plus further escorting costs that are dependent on the number of flights required. That does not include the wider costs of implementing the Illegal Migration Act 2023, such as the cost of providing sufficient detention facilities to hold people before they are relocated. It would be helpful if the Minister could explain what arrangements are in place for that; that is linked to my question on capital costs.

Will the Minister comment on whether it was a mistake not to make the full set of costs I have just listed known to Members of this House, especially given that Members were legislating on this policy but did not have the information available on cost to make a judgment on value for money? Why did it require an investigation by the National Audit Office to get basic, factual information? Does the Minister think that the permanent secretary is wrong in his assessment that there is insufficient evidence

“to demonstrate that the policy will have a deterrent effect significant enough”

to justify its cost? Is the Minister also able to assist the House on the number of people who will be sent to Rwanda under the Illegal Migration Act after the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill is enacted?

In recent days, it has appeared that the Government will offer asylum seekers whose applications are unsuccessful £3,000 to relocate to Rwanda voluntarily, alongside those forcibly removed under the scheme, and that they too will be entitled to support for five years.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

The right hon. Lady is absolutely right: the justification that we hear time and again from those on the Government Benches for the Rwanda scheme is that it will break the business model of the people smugglers and traffickers. Does she think that providing a voucher scheme for people traffickers is going to break their business model?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

The right hon. Gentleman makes his point very clearly. To go back to that new development that we have heard about in recent days, will the Minister be clear with the House about what offer is being made for voluntary relocation? How many individuals will be eligible for the scheme? How much has the Home Office budgeted in total for support costs? The press are reporting that Home Office officials are calling asylum seekers to ask them if they would like to be sent to Rwanda. Is that correct?

In conclusion, for Parliament to be able to do its job, we need a major culture change at the Home Office. Calls for financial information must never be treated as irritating requests to be swatted away; they should be treated as part of the effective lifeblood of scrutiny and good governance. Big question marks hang over Ministers’ spending decisions on asylum and migration, particularly on accommodation and the UK-Rwanda partnership. If the Home Office is confident about how it plans to spend public money, it should have no problem letting Parliament see the full details in advance of how that money will be spent. If it is not confident, then it must change tack, let the light of scrutiny into the Home Office, and develop spending plans that it is willing to share with Parliament and the public.

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[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I beg to move amendment (a),

“That resources for use for current purposes be reduced by £740,850,000 relating to asylum and migration.”

The amendment stands in my name and that of my honourable colleagues. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), has so clearly laid out, there has been frustration among members of the Committee about the opacity of Home Office spending. There has been obfuscation, delay, denial and downright sleekitness over many months, and from reading the supplementary estimates in front of us, it is still very difficult to get to the bottom of what money has been spent when those estimates come forward for retrospective approval today.

Members on the Government Benches, including current and former Home Office Ministers, are prepared to weigh in publicly and call outrage on the spending of the Home Office, but trying to get any clarity on how the Department utilises its budget has been like trying to nail jelly to a wall. I agree that spending appears to be out of control, but the utter incompetence and abject cruelty at the heart of the Home Office makes things so much worse. If the Home Office was overspending, but at least having a decent set of outcomes and treating people humanely, I would perhaps be a wee bit more forgiving. Instead, it is presiding over a chaotic, mean and dangerous system, where those who are unlucky enough to come within its orbit are drawn into a dystopian nightmare.

It is a pity that due to the timing of this debate, we were not able to have sight of the National Audit Office’s report on asylum accommodation, which is due to be published on Wednesday. I hope the Minister will come to the House next week to speak to that report. We do, however, have information on what kind of service is being provided. Just this week, the food charity Sustain, working with Jesuit Refugee Service UK and Life Seekers Aid, published research that found that,

“People seeking asylum do not have access to sufficient money, kitchen facilities or food to meet their needs, are provided with food that does not meet food hygiene or nutritional standards, in some cases resulting in hospitalisation. Experiences of food were broadly experienced as degrading and dehumanising, especially for mothers unable to feed their children adequately.”

That desperately poor and deeply harmful experience is being provided by Home Office contractors, who have seen their profits soar. Clearsprings and Stay Belvedere Hotels Ltd, for example, have made a combined profit of over £113 million, and Serco and Mears are also profiting handsomely from those lucrative contracts. The UK Government often claim that they want to support displaced people closer to the place from which they have fled, yet the supplementary estimates reveal that they are now quite brazenly pochling the official development assistance budget to the tune of £3.2 million, a staggering 389.6% increase just from the sum in the main estimates. That money is supposed to help the world’s most vulnerable—to support countries and help them flourish. Instead, it is simply boosting the profits of companies that are demonstrably not even providing the very basics of humanity.

Facilities such as the Bibby Stockholm, Napier barracks, Wethersfield and Scampton are being presented as some kind of alternative to hotels, but in many cases they cost just as much if not more, and are no better run. Hotels cost so much because of the delays that the Home Office is presiding over: people left waiting, not just for months but for years at a time, without a decision. The former Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), had the cheek to say on Sky News that this was quite deliberate; the Government do not want to speed the process up, because that would make the UK too attractive. They are presiding over their own failure quite deliberately and purposefully, so if the Minister says today that it is terrible that we are spending so much money on hotels, I would ask him to speed up those applications and let people get on with their lives.

The Bibby Stockholm barge is estimated to cost taxpayers £41,000 a day or £15 million a year. With around 300 asylum seekers being housed on that barge, that equates to a cost of about £205 per day per person, the same as an overnight stay in a four-star hotel. Thrown into an indefinite stay in a shared room on an industrial barge moored in an operational port, however, you get the bonus of legionella bacteria in the water supply, as well as anxiety, depression, respiratory illness, infectious diseases and, unfortunately, seeing some of your fellow inmates committing suicide.

I have not had much of an opportunity to speak about the Home Affairs Committee’s visit to the Bibby Stockholm, but I will take this opportunity to put on record the sadness, confusion and frustration of those on board. Those men felt that they were being punished for some unknown misdemeanour—unable to get any peace and quiet, living in impossibly close proximity to people for months at a time, with no certainty as to when that will end, and their health needs not being properly assessed. The vessel was not intended to be lived on 24/7, and despite the tabloid rhetoric, none of those I met on that boat had come on small boats. Some had been international students, forced to claim asylum when the political situation in their home countries deteriorated. One told me:

“The longer you are in here, you turn into a person you don’t know”.

How incredibly sad it is that the UK Government see fit to treat people in that way.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I completely agree with what the hon. Lady has said about our visit to the Bibby Stockholm. Does she agree with me that what Wendy Williams said in her review on the Windrush scandal about the Home Office remembering the “face behind the case” seems to have been lost in the way we are now treating some asylum seekers?

[Alison Thewliss]

The right hon. Member is absolutely correct to point that out. From reading some of the reports of the independent chief inspector, it is very clear that that policy has all but been abandoned. People have lost the sense that they are dealing with actual human beings —with stories, with dignity, with a past and a future—and that these things have been completely lost all together. People are treated as so much less than as if they were actual human beings, and that is quite appalling from any Government. It is appalling to listen to those stories, and to hear what people had been through and what they continue to suffer in those circumstances.

Home Office officials have reportedly raised significant concerns about the cost and feasibility of housing asylum seekers at MDP Wethersfield in Essex and RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. In addition to the near £15 million to another private contractor to set it up, it is estimated that it will cost about £72 million per year to accommodate people at Wethersfield—a site about which the now former chief inspector of borders and immigration raised concerns about safety. He said that

“there was an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness caused by boredom which invariably, in my experience, leads to violence.”

That was before the site was even at full capacity. It would be useful to know from the Minister what he is doing to address the concerns about violence at the site, because the chief inspector was very clear to the Committee how worried he was about that.

A report published in December by the Helen Bamber Foundation and the Humans for Rights Network found that the asylum accommodation site at Wethersfield is causing “significant” and “irreparable” harm to residents, and recommended that it be shut down as a matter of urgency. Not only will the public cover the cost of the woeful conditions at Wethersfield, but they are also het for the Government’s court fees in any upcoming legal battles. Scampton, similarly, comes in at an estimated £109 million this year.

The detention estate has been growing arms and legs over the past few years, and the estimates provided by the Home Office suggest that the trend is only set to continue. The cost of detaining someone for one day is estimated at about £113 per person. Expanding the detention estate at Campsfield House and Haslar immigration removal centres is expected to come in at about £260 million. Ludicrously, the Home Office has made quite a deliberate choice to pursue these more expensive and more punitive options, despite having clear evidence from the pilots of alternatives to detention, which it itself commissioned, that were found to be significantly cheaper, more effective and with much better health outcomes for those in that system.

It is no secret that the SNP thinks the Rwanda scheme is irredeemably awful. It is unworkable, conspicuous punishment. The Supreme Court has found the scheme to be unlawful. On top of all that, it is of course eye- wateringly expensive. I would like to thank the National Audit Office for its report setting out the known sums so clearly. I find it quite wild that the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), came here today to criticise the ball that she herself started rolling. I guess it has not worked out the way she expected, but I could not really see what she thought would be so great about the scheme in the first place.

The UK’s Rwanda scheme has cost about £220 million so far under the UK-Rwanda partnership, not including the UK Government’s legal costs for defending the plan in the courts. The Home Affairs Committee finally received evidence in November last year that, in addition to the money already sent, additional payments will be made to the Government of Rwanda each year. Quite unbelievably, some of this was only uncovered because somebody in Rwanda let it slip to the International Monetary Fund; it was not through due diligence to our own Parliament or the parliamentary Committees that are supposed to scrutinise these things, but because of a slip in some other documentation.

There is a direct cost of £20 million to the Home Office, which the National Audit Office says is expected to rise to £28 million by the end of 2023-24. There will be £1 million a year in staff costs, £11,000 in flight costs per individual and the as yet unknown costs of escorting individuals to Rwanda. There is also the bounty to Rwanda for the delivery of the first 300 asylum seekers, which is a further one-off £120 million. Whether or not Members believe 300 will actually be sent, the fact is that this is within the documentation.

The National Audit Office report sets out a further payment schedule for each person removed to Rwanda up to a total of £150,874 each. Again, it is entirely unclear how much this will all add up to in the end, because it depends on somebody staying put once they have got to Rwanda, which nobody can guarantee. The NAO says that the numbers are “inherently uncertain”; I would say that that is putting it mildly. Of course, this does not save any money. The UK Government’s own figures estimate that moving an asylum seeker to Rwanda would cost £63,000 more than keeping them in the UK to be processed, so it is no wonder the permanent secretary would not sign it off without ministerial direction.

I do not seek to malign Rwanda or its Government, but we hear a curious dichotomy from Government Members, whereby Rwanda is safe enough that the legislation can pass, but sufficiently scary to serve as a deterrent to those desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the channel in a flimsy inflatable. It cannot be both scary and safe at the same time; it cannot be a deterrent and something that is perfectly reasonable. Those two things cannot exist together.

Bizarrely, we have heard the news just today from Lizzie Dearden at The Independent that the Home Office is so desperate to fill up these flights that it is offering those who have been unsuccessful in their asylum claims £3,000 to go to Rwanda. This is wild stuff, and again it has not been brought to this House as a proposal and has not received any further scrutiny.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Tomlinson]

I will come back to the hon. and learned Lady’s points—she made a series of points. She is right that she led a Select Committee visit to Rwanda. I very much look forward to seeing the details of that report. My point is that there is a moral and compassionate case for the Rwanda scheme, and if time allows, I will delve into the detail. If time does not allow, there will be further exchanges on Monday, and doubtless in the future, about the Rwanda scheme.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North was kind enough to invite me to Glasgow, so let me turn to his contribution first—briefly, if I may. I endorse his point about there being no one on the Labour Benches. It is perhaps instructive as to where Labour Members’ priorities are that not a single Back Bencher, other than the Chair of the Select Committee, is here in the Chamber to address what is, in my view, the single biggest global challenge facing not just the United Kingdom, France and the EU, but the whole world. Not a single other Labour Back Bencher is here. The hon. Member spoke powerfully on that point, and I agree with him entirely.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I think it worth pointing out that the two other Labour members of the Home Affairs Committee are representing Parliament at the United Nations women’s equality summit this week. I am sure that otherwise they would be here supporting us, like other members of the Committee.

[Michael Tomlinson]

I am very grateful indeed to the right hon. Lady for that point, but there are Labour Members of Parliament other than those two—at the moment, in any event.

Once again, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Glasgow North for his points on that. Let me say directly that, yes, I would love to come to Glasgow. He teased and tempted me with football. If I could perhaps encourage him to find a cricket team, I would certainly be willing to go up—my footballing skills are not as they once were. But seriously, I take him up on that offer and look forward to being there. I disagree with him on the Rwanda scheme; he will not be surprised to hear me say so. I hope that I have the chance today—and, if not, on Monday—to set out more details on that.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North had an exchange with the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) about the plea to allow illegal migrants to work in this country. I disagree fundamentally on that point. It will be interesting to see whether the Labour Front Benchers pick up on that and accept it as their policy. It is not my policy; it is not our policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Diana Johnson]

This has been an excellent debate at which members of the Home Affairs Committee have been well represented, including the deputy Chair, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and the spokesperson for the SNP, the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), who is a very valued member of the Committee. The former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), has spoken, as has the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry).

The key theme that I want the Minister to take away, which almost every speaker referred to, is the lack of transparency from the Home Office. That is the issue that I want the Minister and his colleagues to address. Parliament is not a rubber stamp for whatever the Home Office wishes to do; it has to be accountable to the Home Affairs Committee and to Parliament more generally. I look forward to future meetings of the Committee where Ministers come equipped with all the information that is necessary for our Committee to carry out effective scrutiny on behalf of the House.

Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54).

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I am now required to put the Questions necessary—[Interruption.] The Clerks are wondering if it is 5 o’clock yet. It is not quite 5 o’clock, but by the time I say this it will be. I am now required to put the Questions necessary to dispose of proceedings on the estimates set down for consideration this day.