Half a million pounds was wasted on barges that couldn’t be used to house migrants as there were no ports to put them.
Bungling officials also spent nearly £3million on refurbishing an RAF base before plans to use it as accommodation were dropped. Tory ministers claimed they would save money by moving migrants out of hotels and into alternatives such as barges, military bases and former student accommodation.
But overall the National Audit Office found it had worked out at £46million more expensive. The Home Office had hoped it would cost £5million each to refurbish RAF Wethersfield and RAF Scampton.
But the true costs were £49million and £27million respectively. By the end of last year the Government hoped to have 25,000 asylum seekers living on disused military bases, ports, holiday camps, converted office buildings and "hard-sided tents".
However by January it managed just 900 across four sites - Scampton and Wethersfield, the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset and old student accommodation in Huddersfield. The NAO report said £2.9million was spent on abandoned plans to move people to a former RAF base in Linton-on-Ouse. The document went on: "It (the Home Office) also paid around £0.5million to reserve vessels it had earmarked as asylum accommodation but was unable to use as it could not secure a suitable port."
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Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, said: “This report is staggering. The British taxpayer is already paying out eye watering sums on asylum hotels and now it turns out the sites they promised would save money are costing the taxpayer even more. Rishi Sunak has taken the Tories chaos and failure in the asylum system to a new level.
“On top of the £8 million a day on hotel rooms, the government is now paying tens of millions of pounds in set up costs for new sites in Wethersfield and Scampton, which are still not in use, and millions more for sites that will never be used." She added: That plan has failed on every level with only a fraction of that number on those sites and the costs going through the roof."
Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said the Government had "made progress" in reducing hotel use. He continued: "Yet the pace at which the Government pursued its plans led to increased risks, and it now expects large sites to cost more than using hotel accommodation. The Home Office continued this programme despite repeated external and internal assessments that it could not be delivered as planned."
The Home Office initially claimed that moving people to large sites would be £94million cheaper than hotels. It has managed to reduce the number of hotels being used by 60 to around 340 since October.
Just two sites - Wethersfield and the Bibby Stockholm - are currently housing people. The Home Office is now considering reducing the number of people it can accommodate at Wethersfield and Scampton, the NAO said.
Steve Smith, chief executive of refugee charity Care4Calais - which has launched a legal challenge against the use of RAF Wethersfield - said: “Our volunteers are having to raise safeguarding concerns on an almost daily basis, regularly about people expressing suicidal thoughts.
“Now we know that inflicting this trauma on people has come with a price tag of £1.2bn, and costs more than using hotels. Someone in Government has to be held accountable for the fear and trauma they have created.”
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