Rushed, misjudged and profligate

The Guardian reports on the conclusion of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee that Home Office’s plans to house asylum seekers revealed a “dysfunctional culture of repeated mistakes and weak internal challenge” that wasted nearly £100m.

The paper says the Committee's report found that the department had a “troubling culture that repeatedly wastes public money” after examining the acquisition of the £15.4m HMP Northeye site to house new arrivals:

The cross-party committee said senior civil servants ignored expert advice available at the time during its bid to buy the site, in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, and bypassed processes designed to protect public money.

The report also said that a small ministerial group, which included leading Tories Robert Jenrick and Oliver Dowden, backed plans for the “rushed and misjudged” £15m purchase of the asbestos-ridden former airbase.

In a report released on Wednesday, the committee said the Home Office had also spent £34m on the Bibby Stockholm barge, which was towed away from Portland in Dorset last week having housed far fewer asylum seekers than expected. Another £60m was spent on a possible migrant housing site at RAF Scampton, the former home of the Dambusters, which was abandoned before it could open, and another £2.9m of taxpayer’s cash was spent on a cancelled site in Linton-on-Ouse, North Yorkshire.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Conservative chair of the committee, said: “Northeye was one of a series of failed Home Office acquisitions for large asylum accommodation sites, totalling a cost to the public purse of almost £100m of taxpayers’ money.

“Treasury rules for safeguarding public money are there for a reason and should only be overridden in extreme circumstances. This case clearly demonstrates why those safeguards should normally be followed.”

Rishi Sunak’s government ultimately paid £15.4m for the abandoned prison site a year after the previous owners bought it from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for £6m.

The government “chose to dispense with some established processes” to acquire the Northeye site for asylum accommodation at pace, leading to increased costs.

The National Audit Office (NAO) found in November that the main risks on the site were ground contamination, asbestos in buildings, flooding risks and issues with mains connection to utilities. It was estimated that sorting out these problems could cost more than £20m.

In December 2022, the then prime minister, Sunak, told parliament he would end the use of hotels to house people seeking asylum.

A month earlier, the government established the small ministerial group, which aimed to set up the former MoD sites at Wethersfield and Scampton, the Bibby Stockholm barge docked at Portland port, and the Northeye site to house asylum seekers.

Jenrick visited Northeye in November 2022 “and subsequently led on the acquisition through to the Home Office’s purchase of the site in March 2023”, the auditors’ report said.

The Home Office then dispensed with the usual processes to buy the site. The Home Office ruled that a “full business case” would not be needed to argue that the purchase was value for money, even though this was a condition for receiving Treasury approval. There was no formal “red book” evaluation of the site’s value.

The PAC report said while the Home Office identified “over 1,000” lessons from its acquisitions of large asylum accommodation sites, committee members remain to be convinced it can put that learning into practice.

The report added: “Given that some of these ‘lessons’ should have been evident at the time, we are concerned about the Home Office’s ability to put that learning into practice and prevent such an unacceptable waste of public money from happening again.”

Among the report’s recommendations it urged the Home Office to set out to the committee how it intends to reduce spending for asylum support, how it will fairly integrate asylum seekers across local councils, and by when the Border Security Command will reduce the number of migrants arriving by boat across the English Channel.

The obsession of Tory Ministers with the asylum agenda, their unrealistic targets on immigration and their profligacy in pursuit of these objectives has cost the taxpayer dear, and in the process failed to make any difference to resolving the issues they highlighted.