Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to her Department's expenditure of £5,415.90 at Primark in September 2020 for the purpose of clothing people seeking asylum, which company her Department procured to distribute that clothing.

Dangerous and unnecessary crossings of the Channel are made by migrants in small boats, which are often overloaded. Many of those arriving in this way are soaking wet and at significant risk of hypothermia if not changed into dry clothes quickly. The Home Office has a duty of care to those migrants and ordinarily has sufficient stocks of dry clothing on hand for arriving migrants. However, last September saw an unprecedented number of migrant arrivals in small boats and supplies ran low, requiring emergency replenishment from a local retail outlet. This is the basis of the expenditure at Primark quoted here. As the clothing was distributed directly to arriving migrants by HO officials, no third party company was employed in the distribution.