Q61 Mr Mitchell: Presumably you were meeting opposition to the dispersal policy. I remember going to see the minister at the time, because there was a proposal to put asylum seekers in a disused hospital in Grimsby, which was most unsuitable, as I thought. Presumably this was therefore part of a casting-round process which was going on all over the country.
Sir David Normington: Yes, there was huge pressure on where we were going to accommodate asylum seekers. I remember this very well because, in my previous job in education, I worked with David Blunkett, who of course then became Home Secretary. We were very, very concerned about the pressures in some places on the weakest schools and the weakest communities. We talked a lot about that and to the Home Office about it; so this concern was going on in other departments as well.
Q62 Mr Mitchell: That feeling for areas of weakness did not stop people being dumped in Grimsby and the dispersal policy sending them in large numbers to Hull, did it?
Sir David Normington: Forgive me, but they have to be dispersed somewhere. This was an attempt to try to find an alternative to that. I know that the Home Secretary of the day was very interested in whether it was possible to put people in centres like this, so that we did not have to disperse as many people to other parts of the country.
Q63 Mr Mitchell: Instead of sending them to Grimsby, a nice urban environment, you were going to dump them in a field somewhere near Banbury. Was that because the field happened to be available? This was MoD property presumably, which was easily available.
Sir David Normington: I guess to some extent it was, in the sense that we were looking for suitable sites at that time and this was thought to be one of the more suitable. Obviously it would have been better if we were not in this position at all.
Q64 Mr Mitchell: Was any thought given to the fact that it would be against all planning use and against the Government's sustainable development policies?
Sir David Normington: The advice was and the judgment was taken that, since this was a brownfield site, it could be used for development even though it was in the green belt.
Q65 Mr Mitchell: Effectively, you were assuming that you could just steamroller over local opposition, were you not? I presume that the assumption was: "There will be opposition anywhere; everybody will say 'not in my backyard'-so put it here, where it's easy".
Sir David Normington: I know from the short time for which I was responsible for prisons, for sex offender institutions, for bail hostels and so on, that nobody wants this kind of accommodation near them. There are very few councils and very few local communities that want this kind of thing near them; so to some extent we are up against local opposition almost wherever we go.
Q66 Mr Mitchell: Yes, and so the assumption is that: "It is necessary for official purposes, for government purposes. Anybody will oppose it, and therefore we are justified in steamrollering it through". That is the assumption.
Sir David Normington: No. It is necessary in the interests of the country to deal with the thousands and thousands of people who are coming here illegally, and this was the way we were trying to do it.
Q67 Mr Mitchell: Admittedly the costs were lower than building a prison place, and that was brought out in the tables in the report, but I cannot see what the imperative was to go ahead with it in 2004. Why was it still decided to go ahead with it, when the opposition had emerged and you were embroiled in a protracted row; when all the difficulties had become clear; when it had been shown as "red" in the Gateway Review-and you still signed the contract? Why?
Sir David Normington: It is easy to say this with hindsight. We might not have done it in retrospect, but it was done. It was done by people who looked again at the whole case and believed this was an important thing to try out, as an alternative to the problems we had with dispersing people round the country. It was believed that it was a really important new way of trying to accommodate asylum seekers. As I say, they have to be accommodated somewhere.
Q68 Mr Mitchell: Yes, but you still did not have detailed planning permission.
Sir David Normington: That is true. The contract was signed in July, before the result of the appeal had been decided. That was done for two reasons, I understand. One was because the period for freezing the price on the tenders was running out, and the advice was that, if we allowed it to run out, the cost of these contracts would go up very sharply.
Q69 Mr Mitchell: So you preferred to take the risk of a big pay-out to the contractor if it did not go ahead at all?
Sir David Normington: I guess that there was a balance being made. It was assumed when they signed, of course, that we were going to go ahead, not that we were going to cancel the project; so attention was on whether the cost of the overall project was going up.
Q70 Mr Mitchell: Why was it still assumed that it was going to go ahead, because the immediate pressure, the crisis, the "swamping", was abating- certainly by 2004?
Sir David Normington: It was. It was still believed that, with asylum claims running at 40,000 a year, there was still a serious problem.