Growing Up ‘Non-Western’ in Denmark’s Nanny State

Fatema Abdol-Hamid’s son was 11 months old when the municipality informed her that he must be in day care by his first birthday. Because he was born premature and was still small for his age, Abdol-Hamid wanted to keep her son home until he started walking. She pictured him at the day care, unable to reach a toy or get around without help, and didn’t like the image. With her husband running a Syrian restaurant and Abdol-Hamid studying for a bachelor’s degree, she felt there was no rush to send him off. 

The Danish state, however, disagreed. Abdol-Hamid, a Danish-born citizen whose Palestinian parents immigrated here before she was born, lives with her family in Vollsmose, which is Denmark’s largest “ghetto,” an official label for low-income minority neighborhoods. As a resident of Vollsmose, the government deemed that her son was at risk of speaking inadequate Danish and doing poorly in school. Since 2019, all families in the so-called ghettos have been required to send their kids to day care when they turn 1 or risk losing public benefits, in a bid to teach them the “traditions, norms and values that we emphasize in this country.” 

The Danish government also argues that children from these areas who skip day care are more likely to start school behind on language skills, putting them at risk of poorer educational and labor outcomes. Before the law took effect, 69% of 1-to-2-year-olds with parents who immigrated from non-Western countries were in day care, compared with 93% among children with Danish ancestry. In “vulnerable” neighborhoods, where a mix of white Danes, immigrants and their descendants live, 75% of 1-year-olds were enrolled in day care. 

Back in Vollsmose – which is in Odense, Denmark’s third-largest city – Abdol–Hamid discovered the “traditions, norms and values” her son needed to learn when she applied for an exemption to the day care rule and a municipal social worker came to inspect the family home. Seeming sympathetic, the visitor ticked through a list of required questions, including how Abdol-Hamid would ensure gender equity among her kids (she only had one at the time), how she would teach him about democracy and how she would introduce him to Christmas — a question Abdol-Hamid, who is Muslim, did not quite know how to answer. 

“It was very not scary, but like, ‘Who do you think you are, coming to my house and teaching me how to be with my child, only because I live in Vollsmose?” says Abdol-Hamid, now 26 and a mother of two. “I think it was very absurd. But I was like, I just have to finish this conversation, 

I have to just reach my goal” all she wanted was for her son to avoid going to day care, and for the government not to remove her cash benefits. 

The social worker expressed some concerns about her husband’s Danish language skills – he arrived as a political refugee from Syria about eight years ago, and while Abdol-Hamid says his Danish is excellent, he hasn’t yet taken a required language exam — but they got the exemption, though they couldn’t apply for extra money to watch their child at home, as families living outside ghetto areas can. Abdol-Hamid’s son started day care six months later, once he started walking; today, he’s almost 5 years old and his Danish is better than his Arabic. 

The day care policy is one of Denmark’s controversial ghetto laws, which passed in 2018 with broad support from the mainstream political parties. Every year, the government takes stock of neighborhoods with at least 1,000 residents; to qualify as a “vulnerable residential area,” an area must meet two of four criteria covering the levels of residents’ education, unemployment, income and criminal convictions. But if an area meets the criteria and more than half of residents are of non-Western descent, it will be deemed a ghetto, or, since the center-left government rebranded the law in 2021, a “parallel society.” 

The ghetto label can be a stamp of death for a neighborhood. Ghettos are subject to a host of targeted policies to break up ethnic enclaves through housing demolitions and redevelopment, forced evictions and higher penalties for crimes committed in the area. Parents must also, as Abdol-Hamid discovered, send their children to day care. However, annual enrollment at day cares in ghettos is capped at 30% for children from the neighborhood. This means that if 30% of the children at the day care closest to home are from a ghetto, the parents must send their children to a facility that has a smaller percentage of children from their neighborhood. The state has allocated $1.45 billion through 2026 to implement the law, with the goal of changing the ethnic and economic composition of ghetto neighborhoods by 2030. 

The Danish government says these measures are needed to address “deep-rooted social and integrational challenges,” that is, a concern that non-Westerners don’t embrace Danish culture or speak the language well enough, despite benefiting from the country’s generous social welfare systems. Opponents of the laws say they undermine the social fabric of immigrant and second-generation neighborhoods, representing, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in 2018, “coercive assimilation.” 

“Although there are trends like this across Europe, it seems to us to be one of the most, if not the most, explicit, egregious examples of racial discrimination,” says Susheela Math, a senior managing litigation officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative. She is supporting a legal challenge to the package that is now before the Court of Justice of the European Union. 

The latest iteration of the ghetto list, published in December 2023, names 12 neighborhoods as parallel societies, down from 29 in 2018 as the socioeconomic data changed, people moved out or the share of non-Westerners dropped below 50%. Today they are home to about 28,600 people, with the share of non-Western residents ranging from 53.1% to 77.4%, compared with 

10.1% across Denmark. Most residents are from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan or Iran and, since 2022, Ukraine, though Ukrainians are exempt from the ghetto policies. The non-Western label includes everyone from recently arrived immigrants to passport-holding Danes with at least one parent from the designated countries. 

“We come from so many cultural backgrounds, our common language is Danish,” says Majken Felle, a teacher who lives in the Copenhagen ghetto of Mjølnerparken and is of Danish ancestry. “If you listen when the children play among each other, they always speak Danish.” 

The ghetto laws’ housing policies are subject to regular protests – including a petition signed by 52,000 people and ongoing lawsuits, but the day care rules have flown under the radar by comparison. Since 2019, at least 241 children have been enrolled in the compulsory program, which is free, and the families of at least 53 toddlers have been cut off from public benefits for defying the rules, according to municipal data collected by New Lines. These figures don’t include families who signed up for day care on their own initiative due to the looming threat of legal coercion. 

Amani Hassani, a postdoctoral researcher at Brunel University London who studies the impact of the ghetto laws, sees the policy as a form of “displacement pressure,” meaning better-resourced families can move out to evade the rules while vulnerable residents are left behind, lacking the community support of their former neighbors. 

Conservative lawmakers introduced the day care proposal in 2018, armed with a preliminary study showing that bilingual children with a non-Western background scored poorly in language tests at age 3. While these kids tended to improve by their 6th birthdays, they generally did worse than monolingual families. The study included a few hundred children – – those with parents from Denmark, Western and non-Western countries alike—and was based on standardized language assessments that the researchers acknowledged could be flawed because they don’t take into account how bilingual or socially disadvantaged children learn languages. For the study, educational staff measured kids’ pronunciation and asked them to name objects and colors based on pictures, among other tests, and parents filled out reports on their children’s vocabulary; researchers then assigned them an overall language score. 

Other researchers said that policymakers shouldn’t use these types of language tests to justify mandatory day care because they don’t capture the various ways kids communicate with each other, and argued that young children don’t need to progress in Danish at the exact same pace in order to master the language. Political opposition to the plan also came from professional groups like the early childhood educators’ union and left-wing parties who wanted to encourage day care uptake in other ways, for example by having municipal health workers discuss day care when they meet with new parents. But the legislation ultimately passed the Danish parliament with 78% support. 

“I’m not too worried about the mandatory element,” Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen, a member of the center-left Social Democrats, who have expanded the ghetto legislation since taking control of 

the government in 2019, said during a debate of the bill in 2018. “I will always choose the best interests of the child if that is what is at stake.” 

Indeed, high-quality early childhood programs can positively impact kids’ cognitive, social and behavioral development, particularly for low-income and bilingual children. Long term, they are associated with higher educational levels and mothers’ participation in the workforce. Danes see day care as a tool to level the playing field during a critical period for child development, and the state has guaranteed universal childcare since 2004 — a social investment that is credited with promoting equality in the Scandinavian country of nearly 6 million people. 

“From the invention of day care in Denmark, it has been a political, and especially a professional, tool for crafting a welfare state,” says Christian Sandbjerg Hansen, an associate professor of educational sociology at Aarhus University who opposes the ghetto laws. “It’s become the rule of thumb that 1-year-olds attend day care in some sort of way.” 

The problem with the day care policy, according to childcare workers, parents and researchers, is the compulsory element. If the government really wants to boost day care enrollment, they say, it should focus on outreach and incentives for specific families who are struggling, not threaten financial penalties across mostly low-income, minority neighborhoods. 

“The first three years of your life [are] super important,” says Lisa Bruun, a childcare worker in a ghetto in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. To help skeptical parents become more comfortable sending their kids to day care, she makes home visits before they’re enrolled and invites them to stick around the center as long as they want. 

The rule that no more than 30% of new day care enrollees can come from vulnerable residential areas, regardless of the center’s capacity or whether a family already has a child enrolled there, can have seemingly counterproductive effects. In a ghetto neighborhood in the port city of Esbjerg, the day care Bydelens Børnehus is sitting half empty despite having a long waitlist of neighborhood kids, according to manager Michael Frederiksen. 

Because parents have to send their 1-year-olds to day care, those on the waitlist trek across town to deposit their kids at other centers – typically 1 to 3 miles away, Frederiksen says, but in one case over 8 miles while they wait for a spot to open up at Bydelens Børnehus. However, families from nonghetto areas don’t face the same redistribution rules, and because they usually send their kids to day care in their own neighborhoods, overall enrollment stays low at Bydelens Børnehus. That means openings for neighborhood children are few and far between, Frederiksen says. 

“We are all instructed and trained to meet children at their core level and really build them up from where children need to be built up,” Frederiksen says, standing in a quiet play area in Bydelens Børnehus. “So much money has been spent on additional training, but the swings stand empty because we can only operate at half capacity.” 

After Marua gave birth last year, getting her daughter on the waitlist for Bydelens Bornehus was one of the first things she did. Her sister’s kids go there, and Marua, who has Turkish and Palestinian ancestry, liked the multicultural, inclusive atmosphere. But when it came time to sign up, the 30% quota meant she had to enroll elsewhere until a place opened at Bydelens Børnehus several months later, which she felt was unfair. 

“I want to teach my daughter that everyone is good enough, and to grow up not worrying about skin color,” says Marua, a 22-year-old education student who asked that only her first name be used. “It’s hard teaching her a set of values, and then these values are not seen across society.” 

The ghetto rules reflect a longer-term strategy to use state-mandated day care for Danish cultural assimilation. Since 2011, bilingual toddlers aged 3 and over have been required to attend day care if their Danish is deemed insufficient, a rule that was expanded to 2-year-olds in 2016. But English- and German-speaking kids are exempt from the rule, which is why Hansen describes the phrase “bilingual families” as a “euphemism for Muslim immigrants.” 

In other words, the day care rules serve as the first reminder for nonwhite parents, particularly Muslims, of the social othering that their children may face as they grow up in Denmark. The laws are “hinting at the fact that the community that’s being built here, within this housing area, is not good enough,” Hassani says. “That’s where the parallel society idea comes from.” 

The ghetto laws have also rolled out in tandem with Denmark’s rightward swing on immigration, which has escalated in recent years. In 2016 Parliament passed a law requiring asylum seekers to hand over jewelry and other valuables to help fund their stays in Denmark; in 2018, it passed a burqa ban; in 2019, the government deemed parts of Syria safe to return to and began revoking the residence permits of refugees; in 2022, it announced plans to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda; and in 2023, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, said she wanted to pull public benefits from non-Western women who don’t work full-time. 

In 2020, Mattias Tesfaye, a Social Democrat who previously served as minister of immigration and integration and is now minister of children and education, told a Copenhagen newspaper that people from some countries “integrate into Danish society without any problems, while others lag behind for several generations. Therefore, the most important thing we can do is to keep the influx down from the countries where the integration problems are greatest.” 

Through a spokesperson, Tesfaye declined an interview request. The Social Democrats, the Red-Green Alliance — a left-wing party that opposed the ghetto laws — and several local politicians either declined or did not respond to requests. 

While Danes tend to have positive views of immigration, the hardline political rhetoric has trickled down to the public. Families with Danish ancestry are more likely to opt out of their local public school if the share of non-Western students exceeds 35%, according to a 2010 study in Copenhagen. More recently, the Danish Institute for Human Rights found that white and well-off 

families are more likely to opt out of local public schools if their district has a ghetto neighborhood. 

When Danish newspapers cover these areas, they focus on violence, drugs, gang activity and police action, and refer to kids there as “ghetto children.” Along with the ghetto policy itself, the media coverage perpetuates the idea that all of the country’s social problems are concentrated in these neighborhoods, Hansen says. 

Residents have a different view of their communities. Ibrahim El-Khatib, 57, raised his three daughters in a ghetto in Høje-Taastrup, after moving to Denmark from Lebanon in 1990. The IT project manager says the image of his neighborhood as a closed-off parallel society doesn’t resonate, but last year he was forced to leave the area because his block was set to be demolished as part of the housing development plan. 

“It was very safe for my kids and other kids – – they were there playing [and] nothing was dangerous,” El-Khatib says. “I call it the most nice ghetto in Denmark. … It was very hard for me and my family to move from there.” 

Over time, children internalize the stigmatizing messages they hear growing up. According to a 2015 OECD report, 63% of Danish kids with parents from Iraq or Somalia felt a sense of belonging at school, roughly 20 percentage points lower than in Denmark’s fellow Nordic nation Finland. 

“It’s often among the children, once they get old enough to understand how they are not just seen without question as Danish, for instance, that they begin to feel hurt and frustrated,” says Kristina Bakkær Simonsen, a political scientist at Aarhus University. 

Farida, who was born in Syria and is raising her three children in the same Copenhagen ghetto where she grew up, is already preparing for those conversations. When her 9-year-old daughter wanted to try wearing a headscarf for a few days, Farida tried to discourage her, worried she would be confronted about it once they left their neighborhood, where about three-quarters of people are considered non-Western. 

“I don’t want my kids growing up having that experience at such a young age,” says Farida, a 37-year-old midwife who asked that only her first name be used. When it’s time to discuss the neighborhood’s stigma, “I would let them come to the conclusion of whether it’s based on racism or whatever, but I think kids are smart. They will figure things out.” 

Several ghetto residents – white and non-Western alike— have filed lawsuits challenging the laws. In the most high-profile case, the EU’s Court of Justice will decide whether the non-Western label singles people out by their ethnicity. If so, Denmark’s development plans for “ghetto” areas could constitute racial discrimination under EU law. The Danish government argues that “non-Western” is a marker for nationality or country of origin, not race or ethnicity. 

The EU court will hear the case in July, and a decision could come as early as next year, says Math from the Open Society Justice Initiative. A legal victory for the residents would send a signal to other EU countries that the bloc’s antidiscrimination laws will be upheld, “and that you can’t evade [them] by using proxy wording for racial or ethnic origin, or by treating racialized groups as second-class citizens in the name of something like integration,” Math says. 

Mjølnerparken resident Felle, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, says many families have accepted permanent rehousing elsewhere, weary of the uncertainty wrought by various lawsuits and housing displacement. When the latest iteration of the ghetto list came out in December 2023, Mjølnerparken was not on it for the first time. Its education, income, employment and criminal statistics had hardly budged, but it was no longer eligible to be counted. The population had fallen to 966; enough people had left. 

“Many people have lived in Mjølnerparken for like 30 years, 20 years, and grown close with their neighbors, because they have become their family in a country away from their families,” Felle says. “So really this very strong network of support has been uprooted for many people.” 

There’s been little reprieve while the lawsuits play out. Today, housing demolitions and evictions continue, families with the means to do so move away from “ghettos,” parents must ask the state for permission to keep their kids at home and Danish toddlers are sent to day care to learn how to be Danish. For Danish parents with non-Western backgrounds, the politics of the ghetto package reflect Denmark’s reluctance to accept a multicultural society. Now, this conflict is being passed to their own children. 

“I can’t just choose between the two,” Abdol-Hamid says. “I dream in Danish, I think in Danish, I talk Danish. But at the same time, it’s a part of my identity being Palestinian.”

Further Credits:

The Asylum King

The accommodation did not meet Graham King’s expectations. The fittings were too old, the refreshments overpriced, and one of the rooms smelled musty. “The hotel should have been renovated 20 years ago,” King wrote on Tripadvisor in February 2023, reviewing a luxury Italian establishment. “I doubt I’ll stay again if this is what they think five stars are.”

King knows a thing or two about hotels. As the founder and majority shareholder of Clearsprings, he was de facto one of the largest hotel operators in the UK. Since founding the business shortly before asylum seeker accommodation was opened up to private sector providers in 2000, King had won a succession of Home Office contracts, gradually seeing off numerous competitors to become one of just three key accommodation providers across the country. By the time that King posted his Tripadvisor review, Clearsprings was accommodating around 24,000 asylum seekers in taxpayer-funded hotels, working with a network of subcontractors, and the company was generating a higher turnover than Travelodge.

Asylum accommodation does not operate by the same rules as the mainstream hotel sector. Residents have little choice over where they stay, and cannot turn to Tripadvisor to share reviews. There is, however, an official complaints system. While King was complaining about the price of mineral water from the Italian hotel’s minibar, new documents disclosed by the Home Office after a lengthy freedom of information battle reveal that, in the first few months of 2023, Clearsprings residents made numerous allegations of mistreatment by hotel staff, describing racist abuse, physical assault and confiscated belongings. Others compared their experiences to being in prison.

In the absence of much market competition, it falls to the government to enforce asylum accommodation standards. But evidence suggests the Home Office is failing to monitor standards let alone take action, holding no up-to-date records on the many private subcontractors involved in the system, and claiming it has no centralised data on accommodation providers’ performance.

All three key asylum accommodation providers—Clearsprings, Serco and Mears—have faced accusations about substandard accommodation and inadequate care. However, my analysis reveals potentially concerning differences between them. A comparison of asylum seeker population data and a cohort of 153 deaths that Home Office records indicate occurred at accommodation run by the three providers between 2020 and 2023 suggests the mortality rate among Clearsprings residents was significantly higher. The number of complaints per resident was also significantly higher in regions where the contracts were held by Clearsprings, analysis of Home Office figures for the six months to March 2023 suggests. Meanwhile, former Clearsprings employees have suggested that residents’ welfare isn’t taken seriously and the company is unduly focused on its bottom line.

That bottom line has looked increasingly healthy in recent years. While Serco and Mears generate significant revenue from other business interests, making it difficult to calculate their income from asylum accommodation, the vast majority of Clearsprings’ revenue comes from just two Home Office contracts, providing asylum accommodation across the south of England and Wales. When those contracts were awarded in January 2019, the government estimated they would cost around £1bn over 10 years—an estimate that did not take into account the pandemic, a mounting asylum claims backlog and an increasing reliance on hotels. Last year, Clearsprings shot past its expected 10-year income in just 12 months, reporting revenue of nearly £1.3bn. The entire Home Office budget for 2022 to 2023 was £24.3bn, suggesting Clearsprings accounts for more than one in every £20 spent by the department—that’s including on police, fire and all other services.

A healthy bottom line: Graham King spotted leaving the offices of Clearsprings in 2000. Image: John McLellan

King maintains a low profile, despite his runaway success. Clearsprings tends to refer media enquiries to the Home Office and King has never appeared before a parliamentary committee. (When asked for a response to a detailed outline of this article, the company said: “Thank you for your email but we would make no comment.”) According to my analysis, verified by independent forensic accountants, he has extracted more than £74m in cash earnings to date, much of it in the past three years. King’s true earnings are likely to be considerably higher; salary and pension information is unavailable for several years, and Clearsprings’ expenses include numerous payments to other firms with links to King, including more than £16m in fees to a consultancy firm, which appears to be registered offshore. In May, he entered the Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated net worth of £750m.

In recent years, even Conservative ministers have taken to describing Britain’s asylum system as “broken”. While it may be failing the taxpayer and anyone seeking asylum, for one man it’s worked very well indeed. How did this broken system turn an aspiring entrepreneur from a fading seaside town into one of Britain’s richest men—and how have successive governments stretching back 25 years helped him on his way?

There was never much doubt that Graham King would follow his father into business. Jack King was a successful entrepreneur and Conservative councillor, well known on Canvey Island, Essex, who bought a caravan park in the late 1950s and built it into a thriving holiday destination. Graham was born in 1967, and by his mid-twenties was already the director of several family companies, including the holiday camp and a racehorse dealership. The family enjoyed significant wealth. In 1993, the Independent reported Jack had bid £180,000 at auction for the personalised number plate K1 NGS. (He was said to have been outbid by the Sultan of Brunei.) When Jack died in 2016, the Southend Echo paid tribute to “Mr Canvey”.

In 1999, Graham founded a new company, Clearsprings (Management) Ltd. Initially, he appeared to be set on following in his father’s footsteps by building a holiday park. By the following year, however, plans had changed. The New Labour government was creating a National Asylum Support Service, striking contracts with a network of local authorities, voluntary organisations and private companies to disperse asylum seekers into housing across the country, relieving the burden on councils in London and the southeast, where asylum seekers tended to arrive. In March 2000, Clearsprings signed a five-year contract to become part of this network.

The dispersal system, as it was known, was controversial from the start. The same month that Clearsprings signed up to the scheme, the home secretary Jack Straw wrote to Tony Blair: “We are taking a big hit on asylum in Labour areas. Dispersal of asylum seekers around the country is necessary. But it has also dispersed asylum as a political issue.” Two months later, the Observer published an article titled “Asylum barons cashing in”, reporting that Clearsprings had “dumped nearly 100 asylum-seekers from a dozen countries” in Lancashire and was negotiating to place 7,500 more across the northwest of England. The following week, the paper pictured Graham King leaving the Clearsprings office. Under the headline “The king of asylum slums”, King was described as a “millionaire asylum baron… who often does business from his mobile phone in the back of a black stretch limo”.

Even Conservative ministers described our asylum system as ‘broken’

By September the following year, Blair’s advisers were discussing whether the system could ever be made to work. Justin Russell, who went on to become the UK’s chief inspector of probation, argued the system was “an improvement on the chaos which went before”, but conceded it had become “reliant on dodgy landlords”. The following month Straw’s successor as home secretary, David Blunkett, wrote to Blair outlining plans for a “coherent system which replaces the present shambles”, scrapping the dispersal system and building large accommodation centres to house hundreds of asylum seekers. However, Blunkett’s plans for accommodation centres faced local opposition and by 2005 they were abandoned. Instead, the dispersal contracts were renewed.

It had been an eventful few years at Clearsprings. There had been costly business disputes and litigation. King had been forced to hand over a share of his company to a former business partner, who successfully argued in court that he had been cut out. A judge presiding over a different dispute said that King came across as “a determined, somewhat ruthless man who would say what he wanted in order to get his way”. Over a three-year period, Clearsprings had managed to boost turnover from £16.4m to £49.9m and increased net profits six-fold to £6m, emerging as a leading provider of asylum accommodation. In February 2006, the company won dispersal contracts in five regions across the country, more than any other provider working on the scheme.

Clearsprings began exploring new opportunities. Less than two years after signing its five-region Home Office deal, the company won a major Ministry of Justice contract, operating the new Bail Accommodation and Support Service. Like the dispersal system, the scheme immediately sparked controversy. Councils claimed to be kept in the dark over plans for bail accommodation, despite Clearsprings’ obligation to consult locally. In Lewisham, the mayor said its failure to do so over several new bail hostels was “completely unacceptable”. In Crewe, a newspaper tried to contact agencies that Clearsprings claimed to have consulted, only to find some did not appear to exist. In response to those allegations, Clearsprings said at the time it could verify from “detailed records” that it had “consulted with the agencies and interested parties listed”. There were also safety concerns. In July 2008, a Clearsprings whistleblower told Channel 4 News that staff were under-protected and overworked, describing the situation as “an accident waiting to happen”.

The prediction came to pass. In March 2009, a 24-year-old man named Mark Bradshaw was living at a Clearsprings hostel in Stockton while on bail for assault. A court would later hear that a young woman accused him of taking drugs in front of her child, prompting the woman’s partner and another man to attack him, before dumping him in an alleyway. Bradshaw died from his injuries. Passing sentence on his killers, the judge raised serious concerns about the “disturbing” circumstances that led to the death, noting that the woman had been staying at the hostel without permission. “I would invite further inquiries as to who has the responsibility for running this hostel and why the matters I’ve heard, if they’re right, were not picked up and acted upon,” he said. “That would have saved a life.”

Rumours swirled that Clearsprings would be stripped of the contract. In December 2009 the justice secretary, Maria Eagle, told the Home Affairs Committee her department had conducted an internal inquiry and enforcement action had been taken. Asked whether Clearsprings should continue operating the contract, she said: “The contract is being re-competed in the not-too-distant future, so that, of course, will be taken into account the quality of the work that they manage to produce.” The following year, a new provider was appointed.

A spokesperson for Eagle said she could no longer recall why Clearsprings lost the contract. The Ministry said it did not hold records of the inquiry “because there is no legal or business requirement” for it to do so. But one former government minister told me that the contract was “constant trouble” and that “performance was under expectation from the start”.

In 2012, two years after the Ministry of Justice replaced Clearsprings as its bail accommodation provider, the Home Office awarded six major new asylum accommodation contracts, known as “Compass”, replacing 22 contracts operated by 13 suppliers. It’s not clear if the Home Office consulted other departments or whether Clearsprings’ performance for the Ministry was considered. In any event, G4S and Serco won two contracts each, while two more went to Clearel, a joint venture between Clearsprings and security firm Reliance. When Reliance pulled out, Clearel rebranded as Clearsprings Ready Homes and took on the contracts alone.

Near the end of the working day on 9th February 2016, Clearsprings’ managing director, James Vyvyan-Robinson, took his seat in a committee room at Portcullis House, a parliamentary building across the road from the Palace of Westminster. He was there to face questions from the Home Affairs Select Committee, including one about the salary of chairman Graham King (who, his Tripadvisor account suggests, had been skiing in the Austrian Alps in the days prior and was not in attendance). Vyvyan-Robinson appeared self-assured as he was questioned by the committee. Occasionally, however, he betrayed signs of frustration. When one committee member observed that Vyvyan-Robinson’s salary exceeded that of the prime minister, the Clearsprings executive replied tersely: “I think the prime minister gets rather more fringe benefits than I do.”

It was nearly four years into the Compass contracts and hopes were fading that they would be simpler, more cost-effective or less controversial than those they had replaced. After two years, the Public Accounts Committee, which scrutinises the value for money of government projects, had reported: “The transition to six new regional contracts… and their operation during the first year, did not go well”, describing the standard of accommodation as “unacceptably poor”. Just a couple of weeks before Vyvyan-Robinson’s appearance before the select committee, Clearsprings made headlines when it emerged that residents were being required to wear red wristbands in order to receive meals—a practice they said marked them out for abuse. (The policy was quickly scrapped.)  

Still, Vyvyan-Robinson defended his company’s record: “We give a compliant service… We are able to do that and make a very slim profit.” He pointed to the low number of resident complaints. The SNP’s Stuart McDonald was sceptical: “Either you have hit upon producing a service that is a miracle… or there might be something wrong with the complaints procedure.” So it would turn out. In early 2016, Clearsprings reported it had received 70 complaints over the course of 12 months. By 2020, when an official complaints system had been established, Clearsprings was accommodating around 60 per cent more people but generated 872 complaints during the year—an increase of 1,146 per cent compared with when the company was marking its own homework.

Despite Vyvyan-Robinson’s assertions, in the years afterwards it also became clear that Clearsprings’ service was a long way off compliant. Nearly three years after the committee hearing, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration published the results of Home Office property inspections over a 22-month period. Just 27 per cent of Clearsprings properties were found to be compliant. Remarkably, this record was better than G4S or Serco, which between them achieved compliance of 23 per cent. However, nearly 15 per cent of inspected Clearsprings properties were judged “uninhabitable”, while one in 50 fell into the worst category of “unsafe”, far more than the other providers.

When it came time to replace the Compass contracts, the Home Office considered radical solutions. Options included embarking on a housebuilding programme or allowing asylum seekers access to mainstream benefits. But despite extending Compass by two years, the Home Office concluded it had not left enough time for major reforms, opting for an approach that the National Audit Office described as “close to the existing COMPASS model”.

The Asylum Accommodation and Support contracts generated little commercial interest. Two regions received no bids at all, and the competition had to be restarted. At the end of the process, three contracts were awarded to bidders who faced no competition. As the Public Accounts Committee put it: “The department became a customer in a seller’s market.” Eventually, three companies shared seven contracts between them: Serco, Mears and Clearsprings.

Since the winning bidders were announced in January 2019, complaints about asylum accommodation have continued. Researchers have suggested poor food standards are causing malnourishment. There have been serious concerns that children in hostels are vulnerable to sexual abuse. Home Office data I obtained via a freedom of information request reveals there are thousands of reports of self-harm and suicide among asylum accommodation residents every month.

Former Clearsprings employees allege that safeguarding is a box-ticking exercise. One former housing officer says she had responsibility for 230 service users, many with complex needs. “The mental health of service users, that’s not of paramount importance,” she says. A former safeguarding officer, who did not work on Home Office contracts but looked after asylum-seeking children as part of Clearsprings’ contract with a local authority, says the company focused on profit over people’s welfare. “They were worried about the money,” she said. This officer said managers would blame service users when issues arose: “It was very derogatory: ‘They are always a problem, they are always going to be a problem.’”

Napier Barracks, near Folkestone in Kent, has housed asylum seekers since 2020. An independent inspector found the accommodation to be “impoverished”. Image: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

Meanwhile, costs have soared. The National Audit Office recently revealed that the Home Office expected to spend £3.1bn on hotels alone in the year to March 2024—nearly eight times its initial estimates for all asylum accomodation. Much of that can be attributed to hotels, accounting for £3.1bn in the last financial year. Despite spiralling costs, a risk assessment in the Home Office’s 2022 to 2023 annual report warns of the possibility that “the asylum support and dispersal system fails” and “the department fails to prevent the loss of lives in the immigration system”.

This appears less a risk than reality. Last year, seven asylum seekers are thought to have taken their own lives in asylum accommodation in just four months. Among them was Victor Hugo Pereira Vargas, a 63-year-old from Colombia, who was living at a Home Office hotel in Sussex. An inquest into his death will now seek to determine if there were safeguarding failings. In June, a pre-inquest review hearing heard that Clearsprings had outsourced the contract to another company, which had in turn outsourced to a third company which owned the hotel. Among these three firms extracting a share of the profits from asylum accommodation, it was unclear who was looking out for residents’ safety. As Pereira’s family looked on, the coroner questioned lawyers for the Home Office and Clearsprings about which company held a contractual duty for safeguarding. Neither party could provide immediate answers.

Documents disclosed by the Home Office in response to a freedom of information request indicate the department does not know exactly who is involved in providing asylum accommodation. While its three providers are contractually required to maintain up-to-date lists of subcontractors, the department advised these had not been updated in five years, and the documents disclosed were found to be missing several firms known to be providing accommodation. Providers appear to face few consequences for contractual failings. In March this year, the High Court noted Clearsprings’ “persistent failure” to meet at least one of its key performance indicators but found the home secretary had “not once used his contractual power to enforce the… performance standards”. Of course, poor performance cannot be penalised if it goes unnoticed. When asked to provide performance data for Clearsprings, the Home Office declined on cost grounds, stating it would take several days to gather the information. (The Home Office also declined to comment for this article.)

Judged by one metric, Clearsprings has outperformed all expectations. Its published accounts show that turnover has risen from £59.3m in January 2019, just before the current contracts commenced, to reach £1.3bn in the year ending January 2023. Net profits have increased by a factor of 413 to £60m. In recent years, Graham King has been enjoying the rewards from his business success, riding horses in the ocean off Antigua and relaxing on a luxury yacht in the Aegean Sea.

Facing pressure over the ongoing cost of asylum accommodation, the Home Office has again been searching for new solutions. Organisations including Refugee Action have called for a return to a non-profit asylum accommodation system, operated by local authorities. Instead, since 2020 the Conservative government has been pursuing a “large sites” programme — the same idea first attempted by David Blunkett more than 20 years ago. In March, the Home Office set out its rationale, saying it was “making every effort to… limit the burden on the taxpayer”. That same month, the National Audit Office reported the department had in fact calculated that large sites would be more expensive than hotels. Of course, money was not the only motivating factor. Robert Jenrick, who served as immigration minister until December 2023, said earlier that year: “We need to suffuse our entire system with deterrence. That is why we are bringing forward new sites.”

As the Home Office pivoted away from hotels, Clearsprings pivoted with them. In September 2020, the government appointed Clearsprings to manage asylum accommodation at two former military sites: Penally Camp near Tenby and Napier Barracks near Folkestone. When the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration visited, he found the camps were “impoverished” and “run down”. Residents were “depressed and hopeless”. “Managers at both sites lacked the experience and skills to run large-scale communal accommodation,” the inspector wrote. In July last year, the Home Office began moving asylum -seekers to the MDP Wethersfield, a former RAF barracks in Essex, also managed by Clearsprings.

On a Monday afternoon in late June, the sun beams down on thatched roofs and village greens around Wethersfield asylum centre. Metal fences topped with barbed wire mark the camp boundary and signs advise visitors that CCTV is in operation. Green netting obscures the view beyond the fence, but staff in high-vis jackets can be made out around the low-rise buildings. Two security guards at the gate examine my press accreditation then radio to ask if a journalist should be allowed inside. The radio crackles back: “That’s a negative.”

As well as limiting access to outsiders, the Home Office says it has taken steps “to minimise… the need to leave the site”. Residents can, however, use a shuttle bus that runs three times a day to nearby towns, and so Ibrahim, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan who asked not to be identified by his real name, sits down at a cafe in Braintree to describe life inside the camp. Every day is the same, he explains. There are few activities, apart from informal games of football in the sports hall and access to a gym with broken equipment. Ibrahim pulls up a photo on his phone of his accommodation: a cramped space inside a temporary cabin housing six men, each allocated a single bed, the room a wash of white and grey. “It’s like prison,” Ibrahim says.

There are thousands of reports of self-harm and suicide in asylum accommodation every month

After seven months at Wethersfield, Ibrahim is suffering. In Sudan, he was an engineer; he’d hoped to continue his career in the UK. “But I spent seven months waiting, without doing anything,” he says, feeling “desperate” and in “despair”. Visits to the on-site medical staff had not been helpful. “They just provide you some tablets to sleep.” There were few people he could turn to for support. “Everybody there is thinking about how to get out,” he says. “They are not thinking to make friends.”

In May, Médecins Sans Frontières and Doctors of the World published a report based on 122 patients seen at a mobile medical clinic outside the camp. “A mental health crisis is unfolding”, it read. More than four in 10 patients described “suicidal ideation”. Despite regularly raising concerns with Clearsprings and the Home Office, the charities noted: “We do not receive acknowledgement from Clearsprings Ready Homes.” Humans for Rights Network recently said it had received reports of 14 attempted suicides at the camp during the first five months of this year. Katie Sweetingham, field operations manager at Care4Calais, a charity that supports asylum seekers at Wethersfield, says she has “not met a single resident unaffected” by the accommodation, adding that the fact that “private companies are pocketing huge profits from operating such sites… is utterly shameful.” This July, the High Court will hear claims that conditions at Wethersfield risk the UK breaching the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Home Office says the maximum stay at Wethersfield should be nine months, and Ibrahim hoped he would soon leave. But, in practice, stays can be extended if the Home Office is unable to find alternative accommodation. It’s currently unclear where that might be. During the election, both the Conservatives and Labour pledged to end the use of hotels for asylum accommodation, but stopped short of setting out an alternative accommodation system, focusing instead on tackling demand by “stopping the boats”. Clearsprings offered an assessment of this prospect in its most recent financial filings. “The number of arrivals per year is expected to continue at a high level for the foreseeable future,” the company said, adding it “is looking to expand its involvement in large non-hotel accommodation sites, such as ex-army camps” and “is well placed to bid for new accommodation contracts when tenders are invited by the Home Office.”

Further Credits: