The Home Office has flushed away billions in taxpayer cash on asylum seeker accommodation, according to a damning new report from the Home Affairs Committee. The report says the anticipated total cost of asylum accommodation contracts from 2019 to 2029 has exploded from £4.5 billion to a whopping £15.3 billion. MPs blasted the “failed, chaotic and expensive” scheme rife with “flawed contracts“, “incompetent delivery“, and “failures of leadership at senior level” across the Home Office. This comes just days after Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood admitted her own department is “not yet fit for purpose”…
Chair of the Home Affairs Committee Dame Karen Bradley 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.
[…]
“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 Home Office has insisted this morning that “the government is furious about the number of illegal migrants in this country and in hotels“, and vowed once again to “close every single asylum hotel“. They’re promising to close them all… by 2029.
Read the full report below:
Lucy Powell on LBC, asked by Tom Swarbrick for her reaction to Labour MP Samantha Niblett’s call for a ‘summer of sex’ debate in Parliament: “I personally don’t own any sex toys, but each to their own… I’m not really sure that’s the right place for it, no.”