Mr. Kevin McCarthy:

I have to be honest in saying that our commitment is to provide safe shelter and accommodation. The vast majority of the 23,000 people who have been provided with accommodation so far are in either hotel, bed and breakfast or guesthouse accommodation which is of a good standard. We would be satisfied that it is of good standard. In contracting that, we would ensure that certain minimum requirements are met in terms of the number of meals a day, etc.

We have had to rely on more emergency accommodation as we have met surges in demand over the course of the past three months. We have had local authorities standing up emergency accommodation for us, particularly over weekends, at times. Sometimes that involves camp beds in community halls or other congregated types of settings, which are not of a standard that we would want to be providing to people and are not sustainable in terms of offering anything more than immediate accommodation on arrival, but there would obviously be a requirement for fire safety standards to be met as a minimum. Local authorities would inspect any premises that are in use, if there was any concern around the standard of what is on offer. However, it is the case that while we endeavour to secure and provide the best accommodation that is available to us, we have been securing accommodation that would be of a standard that, overall, we would not wish to be putting people into.