How Western governments turned migration management into a taxpayer-funded industry.
The lights outside a motorway hotel in Kent still flash Vacancy, though every room is taken. Inside, corridors built for weddings and weekenders now house asylum seekers. The Home Office pays about £145 per person per night (roughly $180), six times the cost of standard housing, costing taxpayers nearly £8 million ($10 million) each day. At its peak, more than 50,000 people were housed across 400 hotels nationwide. The National Audit Office calls the scheme “unsustainable”: contracts signed in 2019 for £4.5 billion (about $5.6 billion) will balloon to £15.3 billion ($19 billion). The three main contractors, Serco, Mears, and Clearsprings, booked roughly £383 million ($480 million) in profit between 2019 and 2024, while the Home Office recovered less than one per cent in penalties. Britain spent an estimated £3 billion ($3.8 billion) on asylum accommodation last year alone, triple its 2019 figure. What looks like charity has become one of the government’s costliest business models
