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Converting former British military bases and a barge to accommodate asylum seekers cost £46 million more than using hotels for the same purposes, according to parliament’s spending watchdog.
It would cost the Government a total of £1.2 billion to deliver its program to reduce the use of hotels, according to a National Audit Office report, after the Home Office exceeded its original estimates on the use of hotels by almost eight times. rehabilitation of two sites.
Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said the Home Office had made progress in reducing the use of hotels, which had been costing taxpayers up to £8 million a day for more than 106,500 people since last December.
“However the pace at which the Government has pursued its plans has led to increased risks, and large sites are now expected to cost more than using hotel accommodation,” he said.
He added that the Home Office “continued this program despite repeated external and internal assessments that it would not be possible to deliver it as planned”.
Including sunk costs, the Home Office now estimates that using four operational sites to accommodate asylum seekers will cost “around £46 million” more than using hotels, the NAO said.
The Government had initially estimated the cost of rehabilitating two former military bases to house asylum seekers, RAF Wethersfield in Essex and RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, at £5 million each.
However, spending has since increased to £49 million for Wethersfield and £29 million for Scampton, according to findings published by the public spending watchdog on Wednesday.
Two of the four large sites, the Bibby Stockholm barge and RAF Wethersfield, were hosting less than half the number of people originally expected by the Home Office at the end of January, the watchdog added.
The Home Office said the NAO’s figures include installation costs and that it is now “better value for money” to continue using the sites it has converted.
“We have always been clear that the use of hotels for asylum seekers is unacceptable, which is why we have acted quickly to reduce the impact on local communities by transferring asylum seekers onto barges and former military sites,” he added.
The NAO findings came as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s flagship bill on Rwanda returned to the House of Lords for the second time on Wednesday.
Sunak hopes the swift passage of the legislation, which seeks to avoid legal challenges to his plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, will allow flights to take off this summer. But he expects Labor colleagues to reinsert amendments that could delay implementation.
The NAO’s findings also coincide with a separate report that highlights the waste of human capital resulting from the government’s operation of managing the asylum system.
The report by the Commission on Refugee Integration, an independent cross-party and cross-faith group, used the economic model developed by the London School of Economics.
The asylum system was found to be “now creaking under the weight of a historically high backlog of cases”. If just two of the Commission’s recommendations were implemented, refugees would bring a net benefit of £1.2 billion to the UK economy after five years, it said.
The report’s recommendations included meeting the government’s targets of processing all asylum claims within six months of submitting an application and providing English lessons and employment support during that period.