Labour MP ‘beyond furious’ with asylum seeker housing firms making hundreds of millions as he urges Home Office to ‘get a grip’

15 May 2025, 21:09

Labour MP Chris Murray has slammed firms profiting from running accommodation for asylum seekers, calling for the Home Office to "get a grip".

A Labour MP has told LBC he is “beyond furious” with companies profiting from running hotels and housing for asylum seekers, calling for the Home Office to take control of the situation.

Speaking on Tonight with Andrew Marr, Labour MP Chris Murray criticised firms for making “hundreds of millions” running asylum seeker hotels, and urged the Home Office to “get a grip on this”.

His comments follow three companies appearing before a Home Office Select Committee on Tuesday for their business in providing asylum seeker accommodation.

It was revealed in a National Audit Office report last week that firms Clearsprings, Mears and Serco made combined profits of £383 million since 2019 after the expected costs of housing asylum seekers tripled.

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Murray told Marr these firms are “causing untold damage”, and “only penalised for mistakes they've been making 3% of the time”.

“We’ve asked the companies, ‘how many times are you penalised for the mistakes that you've been making doing this?’ Whether that's been local authorities really struggling with people arriving...whether we had riots around asylum seekers and stuff like that. [The answer was] 3% of the time,” he said.

He added the situation is “terrible for asylum seekers themselves” and said: “The Home Office has got to get a grip on this".

Murray continued: "One of the owners entered the Sunday Times Rich List this year. There's an opportunity to review these contracts. We shouldn't be having it done this way".

This week, it was reported that the founder of Clearsprings Ready Homes, Graham King, has been included on The Sunday Times Rich List as a billionaire.

The list reported the businessman, 58, saw his personal wealth jumped 35% to £1.015 billion in the past, boosted by the rising numbers of people seeking asylum in Britain.

“The asylum system is disastrous for local communities who are finding hotels popping up in their areas, [it’s] putting pressure on local authority public services,” Murray told Marr.

“It's terrible for the taxpayer because it's costing £7 billion. People are having real troubles in these accommodations and yet we were listening to these providers and they were telling us they've made hundreds of millions of pounds.”

Murray added the asylum backlog is a problem Labour “inherited” from the previous Conservative government.

“The previous government just completely stopped taking decisions on asylum seekers,” he said. “So they were stuck in these hotels, and that made the numbers balloon. That's now getting fixed.”

When questioned by Marr about the government's new policy of securing an “overseas hub” for people who have failed their asylum application in the UK, Murray said “that doesn't mean they're not able to stay in any other country in the world”.