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 of asylum places and close 177 asylum hotels, saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds, although the problem is far from solved.

That it took outsiders to highlight the wasteful spending is a symptom of a wider malaise that has afflicted the department for decades – a chronic inability to manage large-scale programmes, handle contracts and ensure that policy and practice are aligned.

John Reid was the first to acknowledge the failings in public, when he became Home Secretary in May 2006 following the release of 1,023 foreign prisoners who hadn’t been considered for deportation, despite the fact that they should have been. The scandal had led to the dismissal of his predecessor, Charles Clarke.

Reid........

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