The Home Office is broken – to fix it, we must first destroy it

In 2023, a team of outside experts were combing through Home Office spreadsheets looking for ways to save money on the ballooning asylum hotel budget. What they uncovered among the invoices astonished them. It gives an insight into the dysfunction at the heart of the department responsible for the UK’s safety and security. It also offers an important lesson for the future.

A third of the 32,000 bed spaces procured by one of the companies contracted to deliver asylum accommodation were unoccupied, and, even worse, the Home Office had been billed for beds in hotels that didn’t even exist: 244 of them. Until the consultants came in, it seems no one at the department had noticed.

Project Maximise, as the money-saving initiative was known, enabled the Home Office to make more efficient use