It’s always heartwarming to hear of a person who starts from humble origins and, through sheer entrepreneurial vim, makes something spectacular of himself, isn’t it? Such as story appears to be that of Graham King, founder and boss of Clearspring Ready Homes. It was reported yesterday that Mr King has this year crossed that all-important threshold from multi-, multi- millionaire to billionaire from his company’s contracts with the government to house asylum-seekers. He is known as the ‘Asylum King’ – and we can think of him, maybe, as a monarch among the wretched of the earth.
Mr King’s fortune is reported to have jumped by 35 per cent in the last year alone. Here is a man who parlayed the family caravan park in Essex into a vast property empire – and whose contracts to house asylum seekers (he spotted a gap in the market in the late 1990s and, as they say, pivoted) have gone up sevenfold in value. The taxpayer is now paying well north of £4 million a day to house asylum seekers.
Having liberated many of those millions from the dead hand of the state and released them into the vigorous, sappy, animal-spirits-infused world of the private sector, Mr King is (according to his Tripadvisor account, apparently) determined to live his best life. He flies private jets, competes as a racing driver, and is to be found whooshing around the Caribbean with his much younger consort, a Latvian entrepreneuse named Lolita Lace. He is seldom pictured without a smile on his face. Good for him.
From the other end of the contract, though – seeing as it is you and I who are on the other end of the contract – we might wonder why it should be possible for someone to become an actual billionaire by housing asylum seekers. A billion is an awful lot of money. Isn’t government supposed to be a bit more thrifty than that, what with the cost of living crisis and such?
Can it really be the best value for money to award these vast companies ten-year exclusive contracts? Clearspring, Serco and Mears Group seem to have carved the UK up into something like feudal fiefdoms. And Mr King’s companies have what seems to be a patchy record. Inspectors denounced two of their sites as ‘decrepit’, ‘impoverished’ and ‘run-down’ in 2021, and in 2023 70 refugees slept on the street in protest at the conditions in their Clearspring-run hotel (it’s quite the achievement to provide stateless destitutes with accommodation so poor they prefer to be voluntarily homeless). The Home Office, who was sued as a result of the 2021 inspection, noted at the time that Clearspring and the other contractors had made ‘improvements to the site and continue to do so.’ This will, I suppose, appease those in a state of permanent outrage at the luxury accommodation in which asylum seekers are imagined to be housed, but perhaps not those who mind about how much public money is being spent on that housing.
In 2023-24 an audit said delicately that Home Office procurement systems would benefit from improving ‘invoicing controls… to reduce the risk of overpayment.’ The fact that the value of Clearspring’s contracts have gone from £1 billion to £7.3 billion suggests that the Home Office hasn’t yet got the tight grip on the public finances that we might hope.
The more asylum seekers who need accommodation, the more money King makes
One explanation for the rise – and it’s a respectable one – might be that too many asylum seekers are arriving on these shores. The more asylum seekers who need accommodation – and we are legally bound to provide it – the more money Mr King makes. Every small boat that lurches onto a beach in the South of England makes a tinkling noise in Mr King’s bank account.
But another answer is that it’s not just the volume of asylum seekers arriving that’s the problem. It’s that those that do arrive take an extraordinarily long time to process. We now have around 100,000 asylum seekers in hotels or other accommodation at taxpayer’s expense. Flying them to Rwanda, attractive though it may have seemed as a headline, wasn’t exactly a cost-efficient solution either.
Opinions may vary on whether it’s an obscenity that our moral and legal duties to destitute refugees can end up allowing businessmen to siphon countless millions from the public purse. There exist hard hearts – and they seem to be getting the upper hand in our politics – that resent spending any money housing asylum seekers at all. But just as a matter of accountancy alone, I think it bears looking at. Mr King’s bank-balance – he owns about 99 per cent of the shares in Clearspring – dramatises the scale of the refugee crisis in a new and exciting way.
Far be it from me to rain on his parade – I should love to be able one day to see him and Lolita Lace heading into space with Jeff Bezos or similar – but is there not a case to be made that rather than spending millions of pounds a day on hotels for asylum seekers, there might be a saving to be made by spending money on boring old non-billionaire civil servants and boring old non-billionaire lawyers to clear the backlog a bit faster?
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