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The Home Office should be split up because it is “not fit for purpose” after squandering billions of pounds on asylum hotels, the head of a Commons committee has said. Dame Karen Bradley, who chairs the home affairs committee, said the Home Office should be divided into two departments – one for managing borders and the other for dealing with crime because they “need different skill sets”. She made the comments after her committee found billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were squandered on asylum hotels because of a “failed, chaotic and expensive” system imposed by the government department. Ministers and officials “neglected” day-to-day management of their asylum accommodation providers even as the cost of the 10-year contracts tripled from £4.5bn to £15.3bn As a result contractors made “excessive” profits at taxpayers’ expense without the Home Office imposing effective penalty clauses or clawbacks. Asked for his response to the call, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: “Well, we inherited a huge mess in relation to pretty well all departments in government, and that includes the Home Office. “If you take the issue of asylum hotels, for example, we had years under the previous government where they didn’t process claims, so tens of thousands of people didn’t have their claims processed.” However, Downing Street said the Government had no plans to break up the Home Office. More than 32,000 migrants are still living in some 200 hotels at a budgeted cost of £2.1bn a year, or £145 per migrant per night, six times that of other rented housing. Steve Reed, the Housing Secretary, said the use of hotels would be eliminated “within the lifetime” of the Labour Government. He said progress on ending the use of hotels for asylum accommodation will be announced “within weeks” and the Government was looking at “modular” forms of building to ensure sites could go up quickly. “You can use modular forms of building. That means it can go up much faster than would normally be the case, and there are planning processes that we can use in these circumstances to make sure that the planning system itself isn’t delayed. Mr Reed added: “We want to get it right, but the intention is to get those former military bases is one example of it, where we could use big sites and get people on there and end the use of hotels entirely. That’s where we want to get to.” Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, accepted “mistakes had been made” in the Home Office under the previous government. Asked whether the Conservatives need to accept some of the responsibility after the Home Affairs committee findings, she said: “Well, yes. “This is why it’s one of the first things I did when I became leader was acknowledge mistakes had been made but we had an answer to this, which was the Rwanda scheme.” Mrs Badenoch said not everything her party did was perfect but that Labour should not have scrapped the Rwanda scheme which “removed the deterrence” for small boat crossings.
