Let’s talk about some of the costs of borders and the hostile environment. Not the physical, moral, psychological etc costs — those are uncountable. This is about the millions of pounds that the Home Office pays every month to tech companies and arms dealers. This money is poured into maintaining and enforcing the hostile environment — and into extending it, to create an all-digital system that allows biometric and other data to be shared seamlessly between police, immigration enforcement and other government departments
The Home Office’s receipts show just how much it invests in creating this data-driven, digital immigration system after Brexit. The new Immigration Bill is essentially a blank cheque for the Home Office to go ahead and create whatever immigration system it wants post-Brexit, with no further parliamentary scrutiny. So now seems like a good moment to look at the cheques the Home Office is signing, and what they tell us about where we’re headed.
The Home Office published its payments of over £25k each month in 2019. The original data is here, and in one single spreadsheet here. No data from 2020 has been published yet. The figures show that the Home Office spent on average over £120m a month last year (that number might sound familiar — it’s how much the govt recently had to be shamed into paying to stop children from starving in their homes over the summer holidays).
Home Office costs in 2019 total over £1.46 billion. This excludes things like policing, which is allocated separately, and counter-terrorism work, whose funding is secret. This £1.46 billion does include some non-bordering costs — e.g. DBS — but a huge percentage of that spend is directly related to bordering.
A look at the contracts and companies involved shows how much of the work of bordering and the hostile environment is done by arms dealers you might have heard of, and tech firms you probably haven’t. Let’s look first at some of the work being done at what we might think of as the sharp end of the border i.e. the firms that provide the infrastructure for processes like detention and deportation.
- In 2019, the Home Office paid nearly £16m (£15,991,517.57) to a company called CWT (Carlson Wagonlit Travel). CWT is in charge of organising charter flights, and booking travel tickets on non-charter flights for people being removed from the UK. These payments come from the Immigration Enforcement department at the Home Office, and are designated as being for “asylum cases”
- Mitie was paid over £52m (£52,116,022.15) by the Home Office in 2019. £37m (£37,299,217.61) of this was for detention — Mitie runs Europe’s largest immigration detention centre, at Heathrow, through its horrifically named ‘Care & Custody’ wing
- The same company also received nearly £15m (£14,816,804.54) of public money in 2019 for transporting people who are being held in immigration detention. Nearly £12m of this was for in-country escorting — that is, transporting people in immigration detention between different centres / from a centre to the airport
- G4S made £15m (£15,188,585.97) in 2019 detaining people at Brook House and Tinsley House. During that period, the company announced it would stop running the centres. A reminder that it was G4S guards who killed Jimmy Mubenga in 2010, and were caught on camera assaulting detainees in 2017
- The contract to run Brook House and Tinsley House was taken over, on 21 May 2020, by Serco. Serco already has the contract to run Yarl’s Wood, and received £5,390,863.38 from the Home Office in 2019. [CW: Rape] A woman detained there, who was a rape survivor, has described being thrown to the floor like a bag of cement by 11 Serco officers when they tried to force her onto a removal flight in 2018. A blanket was placed over her head, and she struggled to breathe and said she thought she would die. The woman, not the officers, ended up being charged with assault. She was finally cleared earlier this year
- GEO Group was paid £3,743,737.08 last year for running Dungavel detention centre in Scotland. It’s thought to make up to 30% profit on that contract
Some of the other costs associated with the physical infrastructure of the hostile environment are achingly dull — taxpayers had to pay £142,943.67 to Gatwick Airport for immigration enforcement vans to park there, for example.
But you know what’s not dull? Dogs! The Home Office paid a company called WagTail £380,018.40 last year for the sniffer dogs it uses at the border to detect people forced to make dangerous crossings in refrigerated containers and on the undersides of lorries, because of the lack of safe and legal routes by which to reach the UK. Sidenote: the company’s managing director Collin Singer once said to me: “They do have a certain scent, the illegals.” Fun guy (more here)
Those are some of the costs of the physical infrastructure of the work of maintaining the UK border. But none of that would happen without the other stuff the Home Office does — the cloud-based, data-driven, buzzword-heavy work of tech start-ups and huge arms companies that work to sustain and further entrench the hostile environment.
Cheap deportations and removals are the ultimate end-point of the hostile environment (or so the govt says — in fact, the architects of the hostile environment always knew it might not increase removals, and purposely didn’t set any targets. They said it would still be kept in place even if found not to increase removals, because stopping people from accessing healthcare and housing on the basis of their immigration status was just ‘the right thing to do’)
So, the hostile environment is supposedly geared towards increasing removals — and the theory is that this will be done partly through the creation of an ever-smarter, data-driven system that allows govt bodies to share information about people, find those who are undocumented, detain them and remove them (or simply squeeze them out of the country), all more quickly, efficiently and cheaply than ever before.
Let’s look at who’s doing some of that work. Special mention should go to the arms-selling multinationals involved here — partly because many of those with Home Office contracts to do tech for immigration enforcement also work closely with the Home Office on something called the Joint Security and Resilience Centre (JSARC). This is a body funded with £11m of Home Office money, and match-funded by arms companies, which second their employees to work there. It exists to help arms companies sell their wares to the UK and other governments, by helping fund research into new weaponry, and “providing a discreet forum for government departments and industry to discuss security challenges.” Its website is here.
The work of the JSARC also includes helping the Department for International Trade (DIT) — the department that signs off on arms deals — to “showcase the UK’s security capability.” For example, if you’re an arms company with new weaponry to sell, you can pay the DIT to hire a “bespoke hangar” in Salisbury, invite some officials from foreign governments and have a representative of the British government show it off to them. The Home Office will help with all this, through its Joint Security and Resilience Centre (JSARC). Firms that send their staff to work with the Home Office on the JSARC include BAE Systems, IBM, Thales and Sopra Steria — all of which also have lucrative Home Office contracts related to immigration enforcement and the hostile environment.
BAE Systems, firstly, is a major Home Office partner on its biometrics work. It was paid £7.3m (£7,363,266.25) last year for this work. The aim, according to its website, is to provide a “biometric solution that fingerprints and IDs suspects or victims on the spot” and allows the results to be shared with immigration enforcement and the police. 21 police forces in England and Wales — as well as immigration enforcement — already have mobile fingerprint scanners that connect to police and immigration enforcement databases. This means that anyone who is the victim of a crime, or who police ‘think’ might have committed one (and we know how that works) can be fingerprinted and matched to a purported profile for them
We already know that Home Office databases are deeply flawed — they refuse, for example, to take people who currently have leave to remain off their lists of people who can be targeted by immigration enforcement, because those people could potentially become undocumented at some point in the future.
Flawed Home Office databases, for example, led to the raid in which Tapiwa Matukutire — a father living in the UK with his British wife — was pinned naked to the ground by immigration enforcement officers acting on incorrect information supplied by the DVLA.
And apart from the dangers of sharing flawed databases between police and immigration enforcement, the basic question is why anyone with insecure immigration status — whether undocumented or with some limited form of leave — would seek support after being the victim of a crime, if doing so meant they would be fingerprinted and searched in a system that essentially treats victims and suspects in the same way. For more on why on-the-spot fingerprint scanning is so deeply sinister, and will entrench the racist policing and immigration enforcement tactics already on our streets, check out Remi Joseph-Salisbury’s excellent piece from last year.
IBM runs the Immigration and Asylum Biometric System (IABS), the database that holds facial and fingerprint information, as well as digital documents, for anyone who has applied either for asylum or for any type of visa in the UK. It also runs Semaphore, the much-criticised system running since 2004 to flag ‘persons of interest’ before they arrive in the UK. It got over £15m (£15,156,472.65) of Home Office funds for this work last year.
IABS is currently being merged with IDENT1, the police database of over 7.1 million fingerprints of anyone arrested for an offence in the UK. This system is already used by UK Visas and Immigration to check over 40,000 people’s identities each week. IDENT1 is run by arms firm Northrop Grumman, which was paid £2,562,928.67 for this work in 2019.
Leidos, an arms company that like Northrop Grumman, IBM and BAE Systems profits from bloodshed all over the world, last year won a 10-year Home Office contract, reportedly worth £300m, to merge the two existing databases and create a fully integrated biometrics system to be used by law enforcement and border management agents.
Sopra Steria received a cool £15m (£15,081,729.93) from the Home Office in 2019 for what most people agree has been its disastrous handling of the digitisation of visa processing services, meant to pave the way for the digital immigration system post-Brexit. Applicants have been forced to travel across the country for appointments that can cost hundreds of pounds, just to submit their fingerprints and have their documents scanned in. The firm was also offering legal advice, a massive conflict of interest for a company also charging applicants to process their visa applications.
Thales, meanwhile, were paid over £7m (£7,296,095.20) for developing the UK’s new proudly blue post-Brexit passports (the contract went to a company called Gemalto in 2018, which was bought out by Thales the following year). The passport’s data page will be made out of the same material as bulletproof glass, in a nod to Thales’s other business activities, which include making some of the tanks and laser-guided missile systems used by Saudi Arabia and its allies to bomb wedding parties and school buses in Yemen over the past 5 years.
Fujitsu, a key provider of IT services to the Ministry of Defence, also has a lucrative Home Office contract to provide algorithms that allow fingerprint data to be shared more quickly and easily between police and immigration enforcement. It was paid £14.6m (£14,682,486.37) by the Home Office for this work in 2019.
So the mega contracts that make up this project — streamlining and digitising each element of a system of data-sharing between government agencies — have gone to big suppliers. But there are dozens of other, smaller, firms that do lots of the legwork of designing and maintaining the hostile environment.
- A company called BJSS Limited is working on Atlas, the new casework system that is meant to be a ‘one-screen’ system for seeing everything about someone’s immigration history in one place. This system was first scheduled for roll-out in 2017 but the latest guess for implementation is now 2021. There’s more on Atlas here: https://www.bjss.com/atlas/ — BJSS earned £3m (3,162,340.61) for this work last year.
- London tech firm 6Point6 was paid nearly £6m (5,579,147.80) last year to provide cloud-based data management for the visa application system. Its platform allows 2000 card transactions to be made per hour, helping the Home Office make up to 800% profit on some visa application fees more quickly
- Identity E2E provides cloud-based biometrics services to the Home Office, helping create a single biometrics platform for the Home Office, in line with its overall biometrics strategy. Identity E2E was paid just over £3m (£3,122,777.02) for this work.
Overall, the Home Office far outstrips all other government departments in its spending on cloud-based software and hosting.
Although so much of the focus is on data, algorithms and automation, one of the biggest costs incurred by the Home Office last year was still on people. It paid £9.5m (9,542,503.26) to a recruitment firm called Alexander Mann Solutions.
And finally, last but truly not least: in fact, one of the biggest earners from the Home Office during 2019 wasn’t actually a private contractor or service provider — it was the Government Legal Department. Basically, the Home Office spent over £26 million defending itself in court during 2019. This was the second-biggest payout from the Home Office for bordering functions last year, after the £37m it paid to Mitie for immigration detention.
This was to pay, amongst other things, the lawyers who argued in court that it’s fine for the government to cause racial discrimination by pursuing its Right to Rent policy, and that the Home Office should be allowed to deny British children their citizenship rights if they can’t afford to pay over a grand to apply. There’s something horribly circular about setting up an immigration system (ostensibly) designed to save money by systematically denying people their rights, only to spend millions of pounds each month arguing in court that denying people their rights is justified, because it’s saving money
There’s lots of companies and contracts not mentioned here, partly because this is already ridiculously long, and partly because I personally find them too dull to contemplate (I don’t know why I find it so depressing that there’s a company called Computacentre, but I do). The fuller list of some of the relevant companies and what they earned monthly from Home Office contracts is here.
TL;DR: The Home Office pays millions of pounds of taxpayer money each month to the arms traders and tech start-ups that do the work of the hostile environment. It’s an insidious, interconnected web, driven by data. This work further entrenches a system that denies people their basic rights because it is seen as “the right thing to do,” and that also costs millions of pounds each month to defend in court.
If that’s TL;DR: dismantle the hostile environment.