Asylum Accommodation is Ripping off the Taxpayer 

As the Knight of the North gallops down on his trusty steed to claim his throne, life goes on for those who work and fund the shenanigans of the ruling class.  

Of all the numerous matters of state which will land on the heir apparent’s desk, illegal immigration will be – whether he likes it or not – paramount.  Not only the extent of it but also how it is dealt with.

Attention has turned increasingly to the companies which have contracts to provide accommodation and ancillary services to asylum seekers. 

As is well known, FTSE-listed Serco benefits from not only asylum accommodation but also runs prisons, immigration detention centres, defence contracts, rail services, health contracts and many other government services – not always effectively. This in itself begs questions as to why one company has a monopoly in so many areas and whether its highly lucrative contracts provide the best possible value for taxpayers’ money. 

The Home Office awarded regional contracts to three asylum accommodation providers: 

• Clearsprings Ready Homes – South England and Wales
• Serco – Midlands/East and North West
• Mears – Scotland, Northern Ireland, North East and Yorkshire/Humber

One of the more important findings of recent investigations is that while the contracts were competitively awarded, the Home Office substantially underestimated future demand for accommodation. The National Audit Office subsequently found that the original programme estimate of £4.5 billion had risen to about £15.3 billion – more than threefold – over the life of the contracts.  

In 2019, Clearsprings won major 10-year Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts (AASC) from the Home Office This includes the army training camp in Crowborough, East Sussex, which is currently being used to house up to 540 asylum seekers. Initially the Home Office indicated that this would be for just one year but local residents have recently learned that in fact the contract is likely to be extended to 2030. As with all the dealings between the Home Office and local authorities such as Wealden District Council, there has been a pattern of obfuscation and lack of clarity which has added significantly to local ill feeling.

Clearsprings was founded by Essex-based Graham King in 1999 and his wealth has grown to extraordinary levels alongside the expansion of Home Office accommodation contracts. The group has a managing director but King remains controlling owner. King, enjoyed a 35% jump in his fortune last year, making him one of the Sunday Times Rich List’s new billionaires: he was ranked 154 in the 2025 list with a fortune of £1.015 billion.

These figures have attracted considerable political attention because most revenues derive from taxpayer-funded accommodation contracts. The South region contract awarded to Clearsprings had an initial value of approximately £662 million and runs until August 2029. The Wales contract had an initial value of approximately £334 million.  

As with the other Home Office contractors, Clearsprings generally uses a mix of HMOs, hotels and larger sites. Steve Lakey, Clearpsrings’ managing director, had already appeared before a House of Commons select committee and, in a follow up session of the Home Affairs Committee chaired by Dame Karen Bradlley on June 9th, oral evidence was sought from Lakey and Home Office representatives relating specifically to the management and delivery of Crowborough camp. 

In this session the focus of the committee was less on ‘Why was Clearsprings chosen?’ and more ‘Why were the contracts designed and managed in a way that led to such a dramatic increase in costs and whether large profits are appropriate in publicly funded asylum accommodation contracts?’ 

In the Home Office’s management of asylum accommodation report published last October, it was recommended that:

The Home Office should also give urgent consideration to the practical implications of exercising the contractual break clauses, that become exercisable from March 2026. Given these contracts will continue to cost vast sums of taxpayer money, the Home Office must ensure it acquires the capacity to manage them in a competent way.

Crowborough camp was opened in January and numbers in the camp have grown steadily. From the outset there have been protests and dissent on the part of local residents and their representatives. Much of this has been directed at the Home Office and specifically the input of Alex Norris MP, who is Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum. There has been a notable lack of transparency on his office’s part and criticism has related particularly to the fact that decisions were made in secret before any meaningful consultation and impact assessment and that when information was released it was done tardily. The Lib Dem Deputy Leader of Wealden District Council, Councillor James Partridge, has described the Home Office as being “secretive, evasive and at crucial moments completely silent”, adding that many people and stakeholders have completely lost confidence in it. Local MP Nus Ghani – a.k.a. Madam Deputy Speaker – has voiced similar views.

At this latest session the committee highlighted concerns surrounding the fact that contract values have increased more than threefold and in inverse proportion to the quality of the accommodation delivered. 

Chris Murray, Labour MP for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh, pushed the managing director of Clearsprings for factual answers regarding current occupancy on the site and an analysis of comparative costings between the camp, hotels and other aspects; he received scant answers.  

Murray reminded MPs that Clearsprings had previously failed inspections no less than 70% of the time. He added:

We have had reports of people being overcrowded, people sleeping in rooms with no curtains, people sleeping in rooms with bedbugs, with vermin and with holes in the roof, people dying and their next-of-kin not being informed, and people dying and the local authority not being informed.

Indeed, over recent years there have been many reports and complaints about the standard of Clearsprings’ accommodation. All the more reason therefore to find it extraordinary that, given Labour’s aim to close hotels, Clearsprings also has an ongoing contract to provide dispersal accommodation — be it HMOs or office or student blocks. Lakey claimed to be about 50% through identifying 10,000 additional bedspaces – to which Murray responded that there was scant evidence of that but that: “Meanwhile, you are staying in a system that saw your profits increase 413-fold between 2019 and 2023.”

With reference to Crowborough camp, Home Office official Andrew Larter apologised for the handling of the scheme and frankly acknowledged that accommodation at Crowborough would cost roughly the same as hotels on a per-person basis. According to BBC reporting, he told councillors that costs were expected to exceed £100 per person per night before accounting for the capital expenditure needed to convert the site for asylum use. He also apologised for the “difficult impact” the process had on councillors and the community.  

In something of an understatement, when speaking of the interaction between the Home Office and Crowborough local authorities and residents, Alex Norris said: “We didn’t get everything right.”

As the Times reported last week, Home Office officials said the camp had cost £7.1 million in the first four months. It meant the cost of housing an asylum seeker per night at the military base was £160. The average cost of housing migrants in hotels is £144 each per night, which Alex Norris said could fall to £135 when the site reaches full capacity. In spite of the damning indictments of Clearsprings, Shabana Mahmood has so far resisted calls to trigger a potential break clause in the contracts signed with the company, or with Serco and Mears. 

There are clear reasons for Mahmood’s disinclination to do so. In the last seven days alone, 1,915 migrants have entered the UK via the Channel. Since Starmer took office, 50,271 have entered via the Channel. The accommodation needs for such numbers are extraordinary to contemplate. Crowborough camp operates on a cyclical basis with a maximum stay of 80 days. As one group leaves another will arrive and of those leaving the majority will need ongoing accommodation. The ongoing requirement for ever more such accommodation is frankly mindboggling.

Be that as it may, it is appalling that individuals such as Graham King should become incredibly rich at the – literal – expense of taxpayers. The fact that his ‘product’ is a shoddy rip-off makes this situation even more objectionable. 

At his recent appearance, Home Office Minister Alex Norris seemed fairly relaxed about the situation, while the Clearsprings’ managing director hadn’t even bothered to assemble relevant data prior to the session. 

I would suggest that the person feeling most relaxed about the whole dire situation is Graham King of Clearsprings and his directors and contractors. People who work and pay taxes are being forced to feed the maw of this voracious animal that is uncontrolled immigration. It is frankly an obscenity that companies and individuals should be enriched in this way and if the incoming PM really wants to be more popular than his predecessor, he will seek to act in the interests of the majority of people, put an end to illegal immigration and, yes, stop passing our money to a cohort of profiteering opportunists.

Madeleine Gillies is a Crowborough resident with a career in language teaching in the UK and abroad.