Jill Greenwood

No matter where you stand on immigration, watch this. Britain’s asylum accommodation system has become a publicly-funded profit machine. Chris Murray MP asks why the annual accommodation cost rose from £17,000 per asylum seeker in 2020 to £41,000 in 2024. Clearsprings managing director Steve Lakey replies that the company’s average profit margin was 6.9%, with profits above roughly 5% subject to a Home Office profit-sharing mechanism. Don’t let that seemingly modest percentage distract you. The original ten-year contracts were expected to cost £4.5 billion. The estimate has since risen to £15.3 billion, while the three main providers made £383 million in profit between September 2019 and August 2024. Hotels housed 35% of those in asylum accommodation but swallowed 76% of the annual contract cost. committees.parliament.uk/com… I learned this lesson in the motor industry. A British plant can manufacture hundreds of thousands of cars and still report little or no profit in the UK. The legal scam is called transfer pricing: components, materials and services are bought from companies within the same group, often based in the parent company’s home country, at prices determined inside that corporate structure. The overseas subsidiaries record the profit while the British plant records the cost, sometimes even a loss. That is why a modest headline margin proves very little. Follow the money through the whole group and see where the profit finally lands. It's also why this exchange matters. Murray asks about a reported £17 million paid to a UAE-registered consultancy owned by Clearsprings owner Graham King. Lakey describes the payments as being for “strategic services” and confirms they were made by the wider Clearsprings Group, outside the Ready Homes profit-share calculation. No allegation of illegality is required to see the problem. The asylum seeker gets a room, the community absorbs the consequences, private companies collect at every stage, and the taxpayer receives the bill. This is privatised failure, guaranteed and funded by the public. So long as there is money in managing the problem, no one paid to manage it will ever solve it... @PaulKnaggs, The Heartlands Tribune #smallboats