Asylum Support Contracts

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend talked at length about people’s fear in many of those situations. Perhaps the chief executive did not receive complaints because people were too fearful to make them, because they just did not know what would happen as a result.

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. People who have been through those fearful situations—many of them are fleeing such places as Eritrea, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan—will be fearful of expressing concerns.

The situation is apparently not unique to Cardiff. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who unfortunately cannot be present today, wanted me to highlight her experience of working in the asylum system. She noted how women who have fallen through the gaps of the national referral mechanism for victims of human trafficking have suffered greatly under the lack of specialist provision in Government-contracted asylum accommodation. She told me that, for the women who end up housed in G4S accommodation in the centre of Birmingham, none of the same stringent checks and balances that are normally in place for victims of human trafficking are catered for. There are no non-gendered services and there is next to no security in place to protect that vulnerable group of people. Indeed, she was able to walk into the accommodation and witness the name of a woman who had been trafficked written on the wall in the hall, displaying to anyone who might have walked in looking for her that she was there. That is totally unacceptable and raises serious concerns about the special provision needed for some of the people fleeing such situations.

On the COMPASS contract, an answer from the Minister made it clear that in 2012 Clearsprings Ready Homes was awarded two contracts for the provision of asylum accommodation, transport and related services. The estimated contract value for Clearsprings over the seven years—that is, five plus two—for each region is £75 million for Wales and £55 million for London and the south of England. The Clearsprings chief executive admitted yesterday that in 2015, while things were not quite as profitable as he would have liked, he received a salary package of more than £200,000 in return for delivering the contract. His chair, Mr King, received a package totalling £960,000. Most people, whether they are taxpayers or vulnerable asylum seekers, would find those figures astonishing. Other significant and valuable contracts have been let to other providers, including G4S—I am sure we will hear more about those.

The COMPASS contract has a statement of requirements for dispersal accommodation and transport providers. It is worth being specific about the key requirements under the contract. The first is to provide safe, habitable, fit for purpose and correctly equipped accommodation to asylum seekers and to ensure that properties adhere to the standards established in the decent homes standard. The second is to provide adequate transport to and from initial accommodation, dispersal accommodation and medical appointments. The third is to abide by contractual management regulations at all levels, ensuring that there is a complaints procedure for those living in dispersal accommodation and that organisations report on their performance against the specified standards. Each of those duties must fulfil the broader contractual duties to promote and safeguard the welfare of children in particular, to ensure the safety and security of those living within dispersed accommodation, and to ensure that staff have an overview of the asylum process and the needs particular to those seeking asylum.

Yesterday, I made that point directly to the chief executive of Clearsprings, who appeared to imply in his evidence to the Home Affairs Committee that his duties relate only to the bare provision of housing. The words he used were that he was “contractually compliant”. Given the very specific needs of the group of people he is accommodating, I argue that his company and the Home Office should be acting proactively to ensure that the duties set out in the contract are fulfilled.

I have given a number of examples already, but it is not only from my experience that I question whether the standards are being met. During 2015, the Welsh Refugee Council collated a series of complaints demonstrating persistent failings to meet the standards. Analysis of the data reveals a series of persistent concerns around standards of accommodation, size of accommodation, and harassment and antisocial behaviour experienced in accommodation from other tenants and members of staff.

The complaints reveal that it is not simply the physical condition of the properties provided by Clearsprings—we have heard about the situation at Lynx House—that are of concern for service users and providers; the standards of service provision were identified as a serious concern, and there was a general feeling that the service provider had little appreciation of the difficulties faced by asylum seekers and their reasons for seeking sanctuary in the UK. There was a common perception in the survey that there was a greater focus on internal targets and profit generation than on providing a service that protected and supported vulnerable people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) on securing this important debate.

As we have heard, the COMPASS contracts for asylum seekers have been far from problem-free. When the second five-year contract came to an end in 2010, interim contracts were issued while the coalition Government assessed whether and how to proceed with the COMPASS programme. In 2012, G4S, Serco and Clearsprings were awarded contracts to house 23,000 asylum seekers as part of Home Office plans to save £140 million on the service over seven years. Jomast, from Teesside, was awarded the two-year interim contract for the north-east in 2010, which has since been subcontracted to G4S to provide accommodation. It is interesting that the north-east was the only region of the UK where local authority consortia were cut out of the process. We do not know whether that was a dry run for privatisation, but that is certainly my impression. There is no doubt that there are huge profits to be made in the business, otherwise those landlords would not be in it.

Perhaps of greater significance, G4S had not previously been a housing provider and was completely unfamiliar with the rigours and requirements of delivering services in such a sensitive sector. It is hardly surprising, then, that it completely failed to source suitable accommodation in Yorkshire and Humberside. It was let off the hook only when the previous local authority providers’ contracts were extended to fill the gap. How G4S was able to emerge as the preferred bidder for such contracts, let alone pass the required due diligence test, is beyond me. Will the Minister outline how the Home Office assessed providers’ suitability and how performance and delivery were monitored and assessed? I would be interested to hear whether he still believes that those procedures are rigorous enough.

The Tees valley is absorbing high dispersal rates, but I am concerned about the high levels of uncertainty and opacity. We must make the companies involved more accountable to the taxpayer. Private companies that deliver public services, such as G4S and Jomast, are exempt from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. The Information Commissioner has no power to investigate private contractors. The commissioner cannot serve information notices requiring a contractor to supply information for an investigation, nor can he take enforcement action if a contractor fails to comply with contractual obligations. Bluntly, it is nigh on impossible to get our hands on the details of much of what private companies are up to with public money. That oversight must be addressed. There has long been a lack of transparency around public money handed out to private companies and other organisations. Billions more pounds of public money has been distributed away from the public sector and into the private sector in recent years, so the need for corrective action has become even more important.

Without the transparency of the Freedom of Information Act, we will not be able share what succeeds and bring new ways of working into the asylum system. Critically, unless providers are designated public authorities in accordance with the Act, we will not be able to discover what does not work. Many of those things come to public notice through the media and campaign groups, but we need more information.

I would be the first to acknowledge that freedom of information provisions can at times be cumbersome, but, unlike the Leader of the House, I have no doubt that they serve the greater good. It is a core tenet of our democracy that taxpayers must be able to access such information to examine what is going on. Surely something is going wrong if tens of millions of pounds of public money is being exploited by private developers, which make huge profits, when it could be better deployed through local authorities to improve the quality of service.

The Government decided to ditch local authority housing in parts of the country, and I think we should be able to find out exactly how much profit is being creamed off by landlords. If public and private providers are responsible for delivering equivalent services, should they not be subject to the same scrutiny? Private contractors providing such services should undoubtedly be held to the same standards of responsibility as state providers, and I hope nobody in this room would argue to the contrary.

In the public sector, the amount of available data has rightly expand hugely, but many private companies simply refuse to publish detailed information about how they operate. They choose instead to shelter themselves away from open scrutiny and operate behind a screen of secrecy. That is simply not compatible with the principles of public sector provision. The prolonging of that level of concealment will prevent future contracts, whether delivered by the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence or any other Department, from being properly scrutinised.

Justice First is an excellent organisation in my constituency that works with refugees and asylum seekers. It is run by Pete Widlinski and Kath Sainsbury, who daily see people living on the edge after the most serious traumatic experiences. They know what those people have to put up with, and they question what is being delivered. They tell stories of a house in multiple occupation in which women and children are living; social services had to take action to put things right.

Accountability must not stop where private sector involvement starts, and I hope the Minister will address that anomaly. If large profit-making organisations such as G4S want to operate public sector contracts, they should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. That will give the public confidence that there is sufficient scrutiny and ensure that taxpayers can see how their money is used. We will know that vulnerable people who need support are not left barely existing while private organisations make millions of pounds of profit.