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Three Conservative Home Secretaries wasted billions of pounds on a chaotic, costly and mismanaged asylum accommodation system, a new highly critical report from MPs reveals.
Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and James Cleverly presided over a surge in the cost of providing accommodation for asylum seekers, which means the cost of ten year contracts, estimated at £4.5 billion in 2019, is set to rise to £15.3 billion by 2029 when Labour has pledged to end the use of hotel accommodation.
Many of the contracts signed by the Home Office to provide accommodation were flawed, clauses to claim back excess profits by providers were rarely used and no penalties were issued by the Home Office for poor performance. No attempt was made to claw back any excess profits until last year.
As a result tens of millions of pounds are still in private providers’ bank accounts which, could have been collected by the Home Office to use for other public services. The report also has a warning for the current Labour Government that it needs to urgently address these shortcomings or risk further public disillusionment over a system which has led to public protest in places like Epping.
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Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, Dame Karen Bradley MP said: “The Home Office has presided over a failing asylum accommodation system that has cost taxpayers billions of pounds. Its response to increasing demand has been rushed and chaotic, and the department has neglected the day-to-day management of these contracts. The Government needs to get a grip on the asylum accommodation system in order to bring costs down and hold providers to account for poor performance.
“Urgent action is needed to lower the cost of asylum accommodation and address the concerns of local communities. While reducing hotel use is rightly a Government priority, there will always be a need for flexibility within the system, and the Home Office risks boxing itself in by making undeliverable promises to appeal to popular sentiment. It shouldn’t set itself up for more failure.
“The Home Office has not proved able to develop a long term strategy for the delivery of asylum accommodation. It has instead focused on short term, reactive responses. There is now an opportunity to draw a line under the current failed, chaotic and expensive system, but the Home Office must finally learn from its previous mistakes or it is doomed to repeat them.”
The number of asylum seekers in accommodation reached a peak under the last Conservative Government when Priti Patel proposed the now aborted scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. This led to the Home Office ending the processing of asylum seekers. This led to the rushed use of hotels where costs are much higher. Hotels cost an average of £144 per person per night and the Home Office spent £4 billion last year on support for asylum seekers, with £2.1 billion spent on hotels.
Only one large site housing asylum seekers is left. Wethersfield,a former RAF airfield in Essex which can house 800 single males and a further 445 on a contingency basis. This costs £132 per person per night but this did not include the £105 million spent on acquiring the site and making it suitable for asylum seekers.
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The report is also critical of the poor standards of accommodation provided for asylum seekers and raises questions about safeguarding due to children being forced to share rooms with single adults. It says the Home Office has a poor understanding and oversight of the vulnerabilities of asylum seekers.
It also reports that asylum seekers are too concentrated in hotels in many areas, often where there is a lot of deprivation, or near airports. The highest numbers include the London boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow and in Crawley, Stevenage, the London borough of Newham and Blackpool.
MPs says ministers have an opportunity to tackle these problems next year when there is a break in contracts and they can re-negotiate some of the poor deals agreed by the last Government.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Government is furious about the number of illegal migrants in this country and in hotels.
“That is why we will close every single asylum hotel – saving the taxpayer billions of pounds.
“We have already taken action – closing hotels, already slashing asylum costs by nearly a billion pounds and exploring the use of military bases and disused properties.”