Former prison bought for migrants: Government pays triple price for unusable site
UK Home Office spent £15.2m on ex-prison site for asylum seekers without proper checks. Later discovery of asbestos made the location completely unusable for its planned purpose
The UK Home Office made a costly mis-step when it paid £15.2m for an old prison site in Bexhill East Sussex‚ about 2 years ago - triple the amount of its previous sale price
In a rush-to-purchase decision that went wrong the department bought former HMP Northeye (which was meant to house 1‚200 asylum-seekers) without doing basic checks. The siteʼs previous owners got it from the Ministry of Justice for just £6m; making the governments over-payment quite clear
It was bought due to a push by the minister before any due diligence was done on the site and they later discovered the land was contaminated so it was not usable
The National Audit Office is now looking into this problematic purchase‚ as no work has been done at the site for about a year. This forms part of Rishi Sunakʼs wider plan to cut down on hotel costs for migrants which was running at £8m per-day
The governments asylum housing projects have hit several road-blocks:
- Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset
- RAF Wethersfield in Essex
- RAF Scampton (now cancelled)
- Student housing in Huddersfield
The costs for fixing-up these sites went way over budget - about 10 times more than planned. Nigel Jacklin who leads the No To Northeye group says locals just want clear answers: “Many of us were shocked by the price the Home Office paid for the site“
