UK Wasting Millions on Asylum-Seeker Housing Deals, Report Says
(Bloomberg) -- A “troubling culture” within the UK’s Home Office is leading to millions of pounds of waste at the expense of the taxpayer, an influential committee of lawmakers has found.
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In a report released Wednesday, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee said key controls in the Home Office’s processes were “easily abandoned,” leading to poor decision-making and expert advice being ignored.
The PAC’s findings were published as part of its report into the Home Office’s purchase of HMP Northeye, a former prison bought by the former Conservative government in 2023 to house asylum seekers. It paid £15.4 million ($19.2 million) of public money for the site — more than double what the vendors had bought it for less than a year previously — and later decided that the building was not fit for purpose.
This was not an isolated case, according to the PAC. “The Home Office has repeatedly prioritized operating at speed and without regard to available information or established processes to the detriment of making informed decisions and protecting value for money,” it said in Wednesday’s paper.
The damning verdict comes at a time when Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is asking government departments to brace for cutbacks, ahead of a major spending review planned in June. The public finances are under pressure from high borrowing costs and stagnant economic growth, and the Treasury has told several government departments to prepare for their budgets to be frozen in cash terms.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the PAC, said it was “deeply frustrating that advice was offered to the Home Office, from expert property teams from other parts of Government, on the Northeye acquisition that the Home Office chose not to use.”
“Treasury rules for safeguarding public money are there for a reason and should only be overridden in extreme circumstances,” he said. “This case clearly demonstrates why those safeguards should normally be followed.”
In addition to the Northeye site, which was set to provide 1,400 bed spaces, the Home Office spent £34 million on the Bibby Stockholm vessel, which housed far fewer asylum seekers than expected and will not be used past January 2025, £60 million on a former Royal Air Force base in Scampton, Lincolnshire, which was abandoned before it could open, £2.9 million on a site in the North Yorkshire village of Linton-on-Ouse, which was canceled due to protests, and approximately £715 million on the controversial plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda.
In an emailed response, a spokesperson for the Home Office said the current government had “inherited an asylum system in chaos.”
“As part of our overall effort to cut the astronomical cost of asylum accommodation, including ending the use of asylum hotels, we have surged the number of returns, removing more than 16,400 people with no right to be in the UK, restarted asylum processing, established the new Border Security Command, and prioritized the acquisition of more sustainable dispersal accommodation,” the spokesperson said.
The PAC recommended that the Home Office should set out what changes have been made to ensure future investment decisions are made following proper consultations and with full information. It also asked for information on how many dedicated commercial and property staff the Home Office has working in its asylum accommodation team, and their level of expertise.
The PAC added that it was “not convinced that the Home Office has learned the lessons it identified,” and should write to the committee explaining how it has changed its structures and processes.
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