UK Politics
£3.26m a Day to One Asylum Firm as It Houses Nearly 10,000 Fewer People, and Burnham Still Hasn’t Pulled the Break Clause
One asylum housing firm took £1.19bn in a year, £3.26m a day, while housing nearly 10,000 fewer people. Burnham called such deals unfair but hasn’t acted.
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Should Burnham trigger the break clause and end the private asylum housing contracts now?
News | By Matt, Editor
One of the three private firms the Home Office pays to house asylum seekers took £1.19 billion of public money in a single year. That is £3.26 million a day. Its own accounts at Companies House, filed last week, show it was housing almost 10,000 fewer people by the end of the year, and its gross profit went up anyway.
The firm is Clearsprings Ready Homes, which runs asylum housing across the south of England and Wales. And back in May, while he was campaigning to become Prime Minister, Andy Burnham’s team said contracts like this one were “not the basis for a fair asylum system”. His allies said he would tear them up. He has now been in Downing Street since July. The contracts are still running.
Key facts
- Turnover for the year to 31 January 2026: £1,191,321,358, down 14% from £1.387 billion. That works out at £3.26 million a day.
- Profit after tax: £37.76 million (down from £44.1 million). Gross profit rose from £68.7 million to £71.3 million.
- People in its accommodation at the year end: 29,995, down from 39,919.
- Net assets climbed from £51.4 million to £89.2 million. No dividends were proposed.
- The Home Office contracts run until September 2029. A break clause letting the government renegotiate or end them early has been available since March 2026.
- The total 10-year cost of the three firms’ contracts has more than tripled, from £4.5 billion to £15.3 billion, according to the National Audit Office.
Fewer people, the same money
The company’s strategic report is blunt about it. There has been “a decrease in the requirement for asylum accommodation, including contingency accommodation such as hotels”, it says. Turnover fell, but nowhere near as fast as the number of people it was housing. Operating profit came in at 4.1% of sales, slightly up on the year before.
Have your sayTap to commentDo the sum on its own figures and turnover per person housed at the year end comes to roughly £39,700, up from about £34,700. That is a crude measure, because turnover also covers transport and support services, but it points one way. A quarter fewer people, and each one cost the taxpayer more. The firm also says it expects a further fall of “approximately 10%–20%” in the people it houses. The contract still runs to 2029. We have already set out how many asylum hotels are still open across the country.
What Burnham promised
In late May, as he fought the Makerfield by-election, Burnham’s allies told The Times he was “very committed” to ending the use of private firms to find asylum housing, and would trigger the break clause if he got into No 10, City AM reported. His spokesman said he believed “hugely profitable outsourced contracts” were “not the basis for a fair asylum system”.
“Andy stands by his view that the way dispersal has been handled has ridden roughshod over local communities and hit places like the northwest hard, forcing them to pick up the pieces, while outsourced companies profits surge,” the spokesman said, as reported by GB News at the time.
By 31 July, as Prime Minister, the language had softened. Asked by The i Paper whether he would trigger the break clause, he said: “We’re open to start the discussion.”
In October the government told Parliament, in its Treasury Minutes, that the Home Office “continues to consider the use of contractual break clauses alongside other commercial options”, as a tracker of the Treasury Minutes shows. No decision has been announced. It is the same pattern we saw when the man who promised to end “40 years of neoliberalism” brought in a US consultancy to help write his 10-year plan.
The government’s side
The Home Office says it is on the case. “Since the election, we have saved taxpayers over £1billion on asylum support,” a spokesman told GB News. “This report shows that the number of asylum seekers Clearsprings accommodate has reduced by almost 10,000. Compared with last year, 13,800 fewer asylum seekers are receiving taxpayer-funded accommodation.” It says it is closing all asylum hotels and moving people to other sites, including former military bases such as Linton-on-Ouse.
Ministers have also clawed some money back. The government told the Home Affairs Committee that Clearsprings had returned the full £33 million owed under the contracts’ profit-share rules. And the firm is not breaking any rules. GB News reports the 2019 deals allow profits of up to 5%. The Home Affairs Committee blamed a “flawed contract design” that let hotel use become the norm. Those contracts were signed by the last Conservative government in 2019.
The Home Office has also argued the break clause is harder to use than it sounds. It told MPs in January that the clause can only be used once there is enough other housing in place to keep the service running, and it now houses around 100,000 people.
The reaction
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp called it “a huge scam”. “Hard-pressed taxpayers are shelling out more than £1billion a year to house illegal immigrants thanks to the Labour Government’s lack of border control,” he told GB News. William Yarwood of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Making £37million in profit from taxpayer-funded asylum accommodation is an absolute scandal.”
Sam Journet, who leads Reform’s group on Basildon council, shared the figures on Wednesday night and said the party would end “the asylum scam”.
Put the numbers side by side and they sting. One day of Clearsprings’ takings, £3.26 million, is more than a third of the £8.7 million set aside for homeless veterans. And this week we reported that 40% of troops in barracks live in the worst-graded rooms.
Our view
Nobody should be surprised that a private firm makes money from a government contract. That is how contracts work, and Clearsprings appears to be within the rules it was given. The problem is the rules, and who is willing to change them.
Burnham’s team did not have to say what they said in May. They chose to. They told voters these deals were unfair and that the firms were profiting while communities picked up the pieces. Fine. He now holds the one lever that can change it, a break clause that has been sitting there since March. Four months into the job, the furthest he has gone in public is saying he is “open to start the discussion”. Meanwhile the money keeps going out at more than £3 million a day from just one of the three firms. If the contracts are as bad as he said, pull the clause. If they are not, tell us why his team said they were.
Should Burnham trigger the break clause and end the private asylum housing contracts now? Vote in our poll below.
Sources
Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd, full accounts to 31 January 2026, Companies House; GB News, 11 November 2026 (and The Sun); City AM, 30 May 2026; GB News, 29 May 2026; The i Paper, 31 July 2026; National Audit Office, May 2025; Home Affairs Committee report; Government response to the Home Affairs Committee; Treasury Minutes, October 2026.
Images: Prime Minister Andy Burnham visiting New College Lanarkshire, October 2026 (Number 10, CC BY 4.0), and Napier Barracks in Folkestone in 2022, a former Clearsprings asylum site that closed in December 2025 (John Baker, geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0).
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