Home Office paid treble the market price for asylum camp unfit for humans

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Home Office paid treble the market price for asylum camp unfit for humans

Postby dutchman » Sat Nov 09, 2024 7:50 pm

The abandoned HMP Northeye prison site in East Sussex was expected to house 1,200 migrants

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The Home Office paid treble the market price in a botched £15 million purchase of an “asylum camp” found to be unfit for humans, official documents show.

The department paid £15.2 million for the abandoned prison site a year after the previous owners bought it from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for £6 million.

No due diligence was carried out by civil servants on the former HMP Northeye prison site in Bexhill, East Sussex, which was bought as a location to house 1,200 asylum seekers as part of efforts to reduce the then £8 million-a-day cost of putting them in hotels.

It was only after the purchase that it was discovered the land was heavily contaminated with asbestos and therefore unusable, according to Home Office insiders.

The National Audit Office (NAO), which holds the Government to account for its spending decisions, has now announced that it will be investigating the “white elephant” after discovering no work to develop the site had been undertaken in the year since being bought.

The NAO said it would establish the “facts” about the purchase and to what extent the process for acquiring the site “differed from standard practice”.

A senior Home Office manager told inspectors from the borders and immigration watchdog that it “was bought due to a push by the minister before any due diligence was done on the site and they later discovered the land was contaminated so it was not usable.”

HMP Northeye, a former prison and training centre run by the MoJ, was one of four large sites identified by the last government on which to house asylum seekers as it sought to reduce the cost of accommodating them in hotels.

The NAO previously revealed that the Home Office was spending £46 million more to house migrants on three of the sites – the Bibby Stockholm barge and two former RAF bases – than it would cost if they were in hotels.

The plan unveiled by Rishi Sunak in December 2022 aimed to reduce the £8 million-a-day cost of asylum hotels by transferring migrants to larger sites including the Bibby Stockholm located in Portland, Dorset; RAF Wethersfield in Essex; RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire; and to student accommodation in Huddersfield.

But the NAO said the bill ballooned because the Home Office underestimated the refurbishment and set up costs, which were up to 10 times higher than anticipated.

Officials had calculated that it would cost £5 million each to convert the RAF bases into asylum camps but ended up spending £49 million on Wethersfield and £27 million on Scampton. Plans for the asylum camp at Scampton were abandoned by Labour in September although Wethersfield, which currently houses 540 asylum seekers, may be expanded.

Nigel Jacklin, leader of the No To Northeye campaign group that opposed the asylum plan in Bexhill, said: “Many of us were shocked by the price the Home Office paid for the site.

“All we really want is an end to the uncertainty. We want the Home Office to confirm that they are not going to use the site. That will put residents’ minds at rest.”

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