Bungling Robert Jenrick’s overpriced asylum prison clanger blasted in scathing report – ‘unacceptable’

Robert Jenrick signed off on the purchase of contaminated former HMP Northeye in East Sussex to house asylum seekers as part of a Tory spending spree that wasted nearly £100million

Bungling Robert Jenrick’s decision to waste millions of pounds buying a contaminated prison highlighted a “dysfunctional culture” of throwing money away, a scathing report says.

The debacle was one of a series of Tory errors that ended up costing taxpayers nearly £100million, cross-party MPs found. Mr Jenrick, now Kemi Badenoch’s shadow justice secretary, signed off on the purchase of former HMP Northeye for £15.4million to house asylum seekers after ignoring advice..

The massive sum was more than double what the sellers had paid for it a year earlier, and it needed more than £20million to be spent to bring it up to scratch. A damning dossier, drawn up by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), said the case should serve as a warning on how not to do purchases.

It found that “unacceptable” sums were wasted when the Home Office tried to convince the public it was solving the asylum accommodation crisis. The department “rushed to spend public money”, but ended up with little to show for it after the spending spree, MPs found.

It also pointed to the previous government spending £34million on the Bibby Stockholm superbarge, which housed far fewer people than expected. It also spent £60million trying to turn RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire into asylum accomodation, only for this to be abandoned.

And £2.9million was spent on a site in Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire, only for the plan to be scrapped. The report said none of this spending spree produced the expected results, stating: “In its rush to act, the Home Office has repeatedly prioritised operating at speed and without regard to available information…”

The Northeye site was supposed to provide accomodation for 1,400 people at a time when the Tories were trying to deal with ballooning asylum costs. The sale went through in September 2023 after Mr Jenrick – who was then Immigration Minister – signed off on it.

The disused prison had been sold for £6.3million a year earlier. It is now set to be sold by the Home Office.

Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, who chairs the committee, said: “Northeye was one of a series of failed Home Office acquisitions for large asylum accommodation sites, totalling a cost to the public purse of almost a hundred million pounds of taxpayers’ money. Treasury rules for safeguarding public money are there for a reason and should only be overridden in extreme circumstances.

This case clearly demonstrates why those safeguards should normally be followed. The Home Office says it has learned the lessons from its disastrously managed acquisition of the Northeye site.

These are lessons for which the taxpayer has paid a steep price. It is deeply frustrating that advice was offered to the Home Office, from expert property teams from other parts of Government, on the Northeye acquisition that the Home Office chose not to use.”

The committee called on the Home Office to provide a detailed breakdown on the sums spent on abandoned asylum programmes. It was ordered to set out how policies have changed under the new government.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “We inherited an asylum system in chaos. The contents of this report relate to the previous government’s purchase of the Northeye site for asylum accommodation, but we have decided against progressing the site to ensure value for money for the taxpayer.

“As part of our overall effort to cut the astronomical cost of asylum accommodation, including ending the use of asylum hotels, we have surged the number of returns, removing more than 16,400 people with no right to be in the UK, restarted asylum processing, established the new Border Security Command, and prioritised the acquisition of more sustainable dispersal accommodation.”