Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I draw the Chamber’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests and the support that my office receives from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project. This is a really important debate, and I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on his eloquent introduction to this difficult issue.
The previous speaker, the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler), alluded to the fact that the Home Affairs Committee has undertaken an inquiry into asylum accommodation and a report is coming out on Monday. I will be speaking in a personal capacity as well, but there may be some overlap in our conclusions. One thing that was patently clear to us as we undertook a 15-month inquiry into asylum accommodation was that it has been a complete disaster. It has been disastrous for the local communities where asylum seekers are being housed and for the local authorities that are trying to provide services. It has been disastrous for asylum seekers; we found numerous pieces of evidence of safeguarding issues. It has also been disastrous for the public purse. It has cost an unbelievable amount of money, considering the terrible externalities it has created.
How did we end up in this situation? Asylum is not a new concept. The UK has faced asylum challenges for decades, but until six years ago we never had asylum hotels. It is clear to me, based on the 10 years for which I worked on asylum issues before coming to this House and my last 15 months on the Home Affairs Committee, that we must follow the money. The smoking gun in this scenario is the asylum contracts that the Conservative Government signed in 2019, when they handed over all responsibility and discretion to three private providers.
That has cost £7 billion of taxpayers’ money, of which hundreds of millions have gone on profits, but there is no effective oversight of these contracts by the Home Office, no holding the providers to account for failure and no grip on spiralling costs. There has been poor management of where public money is spent, and, as the hon. Member for Wimbledon said, poor use has been made of clawback clauses.
The providers would argue that they have never breached the profit share that the Conservatives baked into the contract at 7%, but as costs spiralled following the pandemic and the disastrous Rwanda scheme, they had every incentive to move people into hotels and keep them there. As the clear financial incentive grew, the Conservative Government put nothing in place to stop the runaway train. One of the owners even entered The Sunday Times rich list. Over the weekend, The Times covered reports of a property owner bragging on TikTok from Dubai about how easy it is to get rich by leasing his properties to Mears, Clearsprings and Serco. We have also seen real scandals in the Clearsprings subprime supply chain, about which there still needs to be more transparency.
The asylum accommodation contracts are a public procurement failure of the highest order. They were signed in 2019 by the Conservative Government, and they are fully that Government’s responsibility. The scandal is why they did nothing to derail the train when they could see it coming. The worst part is that we have nothing to show for that £7 billion of taxpayers’ money. It has gone on receipts to hotels and profits for private providers. We have no buildings or new social housing; we have nothing about which the public can say, “At least we got this as we accommodated asylum seekers.” I do not know about other Members, but I think about what could have been done if I had been given the share of that money for my city of Edinburgh and asked to look after asylum seekers and invest in housing stock. The things the Conservatives could have done with that money had they been able to get a more effective grip on public spending!
The Conservatives locked the country into these asylum contracts in 2019. It is a crowded field, but I think that is one of their most appalling legacies. Next year, as has been alluded to, is the break clause, where the Government have the opportunity to substantially rewrite or break these asylum contracts at no penalty. My questions to the Minister are: what is the Home Office’s assessment of how these contracts have been handled so far? What is his view of how Home Office officials have managed the contracts and their capacity to get a grip on them? Is he looking at the break clause and thinking about whether he should use it?
It may sound a bit technical and dry, on such an emotive issue, to be focusing on contracts, procurements and supply chains, but I have always believed that the role of Government is to drill down into the nuts and bolts, deal with manifest failures and make the system work. That is what I think the petitioners are asking us to do—not to posture, to grandstand or to use inflammatory rhetoric, but to solve the problem. We can do that by getting a grip on these asylum contracts.