Stuart Monk is pugnacious, perma-tanned and, above all, plain-speaking. It would be hard to make £175m in the North-east of England without at least two of these qualities.
Whether he had four years or merely a week to come up with an answer as to why his company appears to have been housing asylum-seekers in homes specifically marked with red doors is a question we’ll come on to later, but in the meantime, this was that answer:
“We were not aware of any reported incident regarding giving rise to any issues regarding a red door. There hasn’t been a reported incident regarding a red door issue.”
So that’s that then. Mr Monk has done nothing wrong. Since it was revealed in The Times last week that asylum-seekers in a deprived part of Middlesbrough claimed their homes were easily identifiable because the doors were red and, as such, targeted for abuse, Mr Monk’s company, Jomast, has been repainting them all. But not because it has done anything wrong.
“The press have gone out and knocked on a lot of doors to try and create a story,” he said. “Some people don’t even want their doors repainted.”
Alongside Mr Monk was John Whitwam, head of “immigration and borders” at the Home Office’s favourite one-stop cock-up shop, G4S. Until recently, the Home Office was known as the graveyard of politics. If Theresa May’s record-breaking survival there can be assigned to anything, it’s the fact that everything remotely unpleasant, like running prisons, deporting illegal immigrants, housing asylum-seekers and dressing the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been outsourced to one particularly loathsome company, who can be relied on to take the fall for everything.
Mr Whitwam said there was “no red door policy”, even if emails from the company’s social cohesion manager sent in 2012 asked them to look into it. It had received “no complaints”, not even since last year, when Ofcom made it change its asylum-seeker complaint line from a premium rate number to freephone.
The Home Affairs Committee were sceptical that no one had ever complained about the red doors, given the number of people happy to do so to The Times. But Mr Monk was having none of it. “We provide the best standard of asylum accommodation in the country. We have a track record that’s second to none,” he said.
Victoria Atkins MP asked if he might be able to provide a log of the complaints he had received. He almost laughed. “Oh,” he said, as if the task were impossible. “There’ll be an enormous amount of complaints.”
Second to none then, Mr Monk. Well done.
