Home Office Under Pressure To Disclose If Asylum Seeker Housing Profit Cap Has Been Triggered

MPs and human rights groups are placing increased pressure on the Home Office to be more transparent about whether companies to whom asylum seeker housing is outsourced have triggered a profit cap intended to curb the amount private businesses can make from government contracts.

Asylum accommodation in the UK is managed by three private companies – Serco, Mears and Clearsprings – in a contract agreed in 2019. The government inserted a specific clause outlining a profit cap for these companies, and any excess would have to be returned to the Home Office. 

A number of charities have submitted Freedom of Information requests on the issue, and in recent months MPs have put forward 12 written and oral parliamentary questions calling for further transparency. But citing commercial confidentiality, the Home Office has repeatedly refused to confirm whether the profit cap has ever been triggered and if so, how much money has been returned as a result. The contracts are available in the public domain, with the section on the agreed profit cap redacted.

Labour MP for Bury South Christian Wakeford, who has submitted a parliamentary question on the issue, has accused the private asylum seeker accommodation providers of “laughing in the face of the government whilst profiting from human misery”.

“The secrecy from the Home Office citing ‘commercial arrangements privacy’ is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover how badly they are being ripped off with the most recent reports of the government spending £15 million per day on hotels,” he told PoliticsHome. 

The Home Office’s total asylum seeker hotel budget is around £20 billion. In February the Home Office admitted that it had requested an emergency cash payment of £2.6 billion to cover