A REPORT released yesterday by the Public Accounts Committee is highly critical of the Home Office’s spending of public money on supporting asylum seekers. While it focuses on the acquisition of the Northeye site in East Sussex, it covers many aspects of government work. It criticises the Home Office’s ‘dysfunctional culture’ where value for money is ‘a secondary concern’, and questions the Home Office’s ability to ‘learn lessons’ whilst ‘working at pace’.
Setting the context, the report notes that in 2023-24 the Home Office spent £4.7billion on asylum-seeker support. This included £3.1billion on hotels. By the end of September last year, the Home Office was providing accommodation for around 106,000 asylum seekers, including around 35,700 in hotels, having decided to reduce its reliance on hotels.
The Northeye site was originally an RAF station, then an open prison and more recently a base used by the UAE for military training purposes. Set on the outskirts of Bexhill, it overlooks Pevensey Levels. The site has been unused for around a decade and is protected by a security guard. According to the report the site was brought to the Home Office’s attention by their contractors Clearsprings Ready Homes in May 2022. The UAE sold it to property developers in August 2022 for £6.3million.
In March 2023, the Home Office exchanged contracts with the vendors for an agreed price of £14.5million; the final price paid was £15.4million which included a penalty clause for delays in completing the contract. The plan was to redevelop the site to accommodate 1,200 male asylum seekers. As reported in TCW, there were strong local objections to both the site and illegal arrivals being accommodated in this quiet and peaceful area. In December 2024, on the day of the inquiry meeting which led to this report, the Home Office announced it would not be using the site. It is currently on the government property list and if no other department wants it, the site will go on the open market. The Home Office are still in dispute with the vendors about the costs of remedial works; the site was known locally to harbour asbestos.
Observing the Public Accounts Committee meeting it was good to see the shock and amazement expressed by the chair and some of the new Labour MPs. The Home Office had appointed an external adviser to be the sole point of contact with the vendors. They had agreed a penalty clause which meant the Home Office paid more if the contract was not completed within six weeks. As you might expect, this penalty had to be paid. What’s more, the Home Office had either not checked the price the vendor paid or didn’t care and chose to pay a 150 per cent mark-up to them. There was public outrage when these figures were released.
Our own research traced the history of the vendors’ interest in the site back to April 2021 when a special purpose vehicle Brockwell Bexhill Limited was formed. This was the same month when, according to the report, the Home Office contracted staff who had previously worked under the Ministry of Justice’s property function to provide in-house expertise in commercial property transactions. The Inquiry missed these 2021 details on the vendor.
The report is damning in its assessment of the Home Office. While the lead representatives clearly felt uncomfortable being grilled by the committee, in the corridor afterwards it felt as if their colleagues who came to listen had seen the inquiry as more of a jolly staff day out. At this point I, representing the No To Northeye protest campaign, gave the lead witness Sir Matthew Rycroft KCMG CBE (Permanent Secretary, Home Office) a piece of my mind and thanked Belinda Mather (Director for Non-Detained Accommodation, Home Office) for saying they would never make a similar purchase again and committing to communicating with local people (who seemed to have been an abstract concept up until this date). Despite this, as an example of the Home Office’s failure to do what they say they will do, the government fact sheet on Northeye remains as it was in July 2024 stating ‘No decision has been made on the use of this site.’
The failure to learn lessons was highlighted by the Public Accounts committee. They did not accept the Home Office’s excuse that they were ‘working at pace.’ The Committee also noted that the purchase had taken some time, questioning the Home Office’s definition of ‘working at pace.’
The Home Office stated they had learned more than 1,000 lessons from their work in this area. That does seem like an excess in lessons learned. Perhaps a fewer more generally applicable lessons would have been better. They added that they had been innovative; their definition of which seemed to be making several mistakes at the same time and still not getting it right in the end. The report points to failures with respect to RAF Scampton, the Bibby Stockholm and Rwanda.
Rachel Reeves’s Autumn Budget 2024 set a target for the Home Office to deliver significant savings by 2026. In order to do this they will need to clear the backlog of asylum claims and reduce new arrivals. At the Inquiry the Home Office admitted reducing arrivals is ‘work in progress’. It now seems likely that the Labour government’s solution to the backlog will be to grant vast numbers of undocumented arrivals asylum, thus moving the financial burden from one part of the national accounts to another. This will be something many people oppose. There is little, if any, good news in this report.
Importantly, the report notes the impact accommodating asylum seekers is having on the rental market and on local council housing provision. The Local Government Association reported that councils were spending over £1.74billion in 2024 to support more than 117,000 households in temporary accommodation. The Home Office has funded 125 ‘asylum move-on’ liaison officers to work with local authorities. It seems they are determined to provide a welcoming committee and the only time they ‘stop the boats’ is to help people seeking to get to the UK to get on to lifeboats or Border Force transport and bring them to the UK.
