One of the Home Office’s leading providers of asylum accommodation has increased its profits by tens of millions of pounds, according to its latest published accounts.
Clearsprings Ready Homes is one of three Home Office contractors providing asylum accommodation. In the last three years it has made more than £180m net profit, with about £90m profit in the year ending January 2024, a jump from £60m the previous year.
In May, the director of Clearsprings, Graham King, dubbed the “asylum king”, entered the Sunday Times rich list with an estimated net worth of £750m.
The other two Home Office accommodation providers, Serco and Mears, have also reported profits, but they have a range of contracts alongside Home Office asylum accommodation.
Although there is a profit-share agreement between the government and the three providers, the government will not disclose the threshold for payback. A recent Home Office freedom of information response revealed that to date nothing had been paid back to the Treasury under this agreement.
The latest figures have emerged at a time of mounting concern about the cost of asylum accommodation, especially in hotels.
The Home Office has pledged to end the use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers, but the number of people arriving remains high, with more than 30,000 crossing the Channel this year on small boats and a continuing backlog of cases in the system. One hotel close to Heathrow airport with about 600 rooms paused its use for asylum seekers, but has recently reopened to accommodate them. According to its website, it is block-booked for the next 12 months.
Along with the high costs of hotel use there have been numerous complaints about ill-treatment and poor conditions in asylum accommodation.
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The Home Office and accommodation provider Serco confirmed that a 28-year-old man had died at a hotel it manages in Warrington on Tuesday, which the Home Office described as a “tragic incident”. The death came two days after another death, a 26-year-old man at the Serco-managed immigration removal centre Brook House near Gatwick airport.
This has led to calls from NGOs to allow local authorities to manage asylum accommodation and to be paid directly by the Home Office.
Tim Naor Hilton, the chief executive of the charity Refugee Action, said: “It is a national scandal that companies housing people seeking asylum make eye-watering profits while refugees live in often appalling and dangerous conditions. We need a new system of housing people seeking asylum in which every pound of this money goes towards benefiting refugees and the towns and cities where they are rebuilding their lives.”
Clearsprings has been approached for comment.
Source: theguardian.com
