The Home Office has been found to have “cut corners” when it bought an asbestos-ridden prison for £15.4million, according to a major review.
The department is said to have made “a series of poor decisions” that led to the purchase, according to the National Audit Office (NAO).
Although an assessment warned that it was “high risk”, the buying process was rushed so the Government could use the site to house asylum seekers.
The site near Bexhill in East Sussex had been bought at an inflated price, according to previous reports by The Times.
The former prison was previously intended to house up to 1,200 migrants
PA
In October 2023, the land was purchased for £15million, after developers purchased the land for the much smaller sum of £6million just 12 months earlier.
The former prison was previously intended to house up to 1,200 migrants, although the Home Office later disclosed that it hoped to expand the site’s capacity to house over 2,500 individuals.
The year beforehand, Rishi Sunak – Prime Minister at the time – said in Parliament that his administration would no longer use hotels to provide housing for asylum seekers, vowing that his Government would “work to achieve this as quickly as possible”.
As a result, the NAO had remarked that his promise in the House of Commons had “generated significant pressure within the Home Office to identify and secure sites for asylum accommodation at pace”.
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At the start of the following year, the Government decided to buy HMP Northeye, although a “technical due diligence and approvals process not having been undertaken”.
The decision was made by a small number of Government officials, including the then minister for immigration Robert Jenrick and then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Sir Oliver Dowden.
An environmental review of the site highlighted a contamination risk from “asbestos-containing materials in existing buildings and contaminated ground”, describing the land as “high-risk”.
The same report has said that the buildings would require £20million to repair the damage. However, this figure was not shown to Government ministers.
The decision was made by a small number of government officials, including the then minister for immigration Robert Jenrick and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Sir Oliver Dowden
PA
The site was originally bought to be non-detained accommodation for male arrivals on small boats until the Government deemed that Northeye did not fulfil its initial purpose.
The NAO commented that the Government’s push to purchase the land in Bexhill “within just a few months … led it to cut corners and make a series of poor decisions”.
They added: “This resulted in it purchasing a site that was unsuitable for [its] original purpose, and it paying more for it than it needed to.”
In response to the NAO’s report, a Home Office spokeswoman said: “Having inherited an asylum system under exceptional strain, with tens of thousands of cases stuck in a backlog, we remain committed to ending the use of hotels and housing people in more suitable and cost-effective manners, achieving better value for the taxpayer.
“We will continue to restore order to the system so that it operates swiftly, firmly and fairly.”