'Non-existent asylum centres cost £35 million'
By Robert Watts, Whitehall Correspondent
Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 2:15am GMT 04/11/2007
Botched plans to detain thousands of asylum seekers in the depths of the countryside have wasted £35 million of taxpayers' money.
Officials at the Home Office have also been accused of a cover-up after scores of documents about the proposed centre disappeared.
Labour ministers originally planned to build four holding centres in rural areas five years ago. But the plans were shelved three years later after opposition from the Refugee Council, the Red Cross and thousands of local residents.
A report this week by the National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, will for the first time lay bare the full cost to taxpayers of the ditched policy. It will announce on Thursday that ministers spent around £35 million on a proposed asylum centre in Oxfordshire alone £10 million more than initially thought.
The centre, in Bicester, was supposed to be built half a mile from Piddington, a village with one shop, a 14th century church and a population of around 200.
Even though no building work took place at the site, the Home Office was forced to pay millions of pounds to compensate businesses it had already hired to build and manage the centre.
Three other asylum centres proposed in rural parts of Worcestershire, Nottinghamshire and Hampshire were also axed. The cost to the taxpayer of scrapping these centres is not known, although it is thought to be less than the Bicester centre.
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that NAO's 30-month investigation was hindered by the failure of the Home Office to disclose key documents, including the contracts the department signed with GSL, the security firm formerly known as Group 4.
In a letter to the Oxfordshire MP, Tony Baldry, the head of the NAO, Sir John Bourn, wrote: "Our study is taking some time because of the difficulty in tracing people and papers involved in the project."
Mr Baldry said it seemed likely that some sort of "cover up" had taken place. "It is simply mind-boggling and unbelievable that the Home Office lost so many documents about these asylum centres," he said. "It doesn't seem plausible."
The Home Office has claimed these documents were "lost" when the unit working on the plans was dissolved two years ago. Its spokesman said the department was aware of only two documents it had not been able to provide to the NAO inquiry.
It is understood the NAO report will highlight the heavy cost that ministers paid for breaking the signed contracts. GSL was paid at least £12?million in compensation after the Bicester centre was axed.
The spending watchdog will also call for ministers and civil servants across Whitehall to take greater care when drafting contracts with suppliers.
Mr Baldry said: "It was always utterly wrong to relocate hundreds of asylum seekers to the middle of the English countryside where they would go out of their minds with boredom.
"The policy was opposed by the Red Cross, the Refugee Council and just about every other human rights organisation that learned of it. But ministers ignored the experts and carried on regardless.
"Now, we find that in doing so they wasted £35 million worth of taxpayers' money enough to deliver a new local hospital that my constituents were promised years ago and has still not been built."
A spokesman for the National Audit Office declined to comment on the report.
Lin Homer, chief executive of the Border and Immigration Agency, which manages UK immigration, said asylum claims had reduced significantly since
2002 and that "Bicester remains a valuable potential site for a secure removals centre and we continue to keep that option under review".