In tandem with plans to house migrants at surplus military sites, the move was heralded by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman as a way of mitigating the £6m-a-day cost of hotel accommodation amid the massive ongoing backlog of asylum claims, as well as deterring refugees from making the dangerous channel crossing to the UK. Several protests have been organised against the project already, while over ninety migrants’ rights groups and hundreds of individual campaigners have signed an open letter to the Home Secretary calling for the plans to be scrapped, describing the barge as a “floating prison.”

Corporate Watch has researched into the Bibby Line Group’s operations and financial interests. We found that:

• The Bibby Stockholm vessel was previously used as a floating detention centre in the Netherlands, where undercover reporting revealed violence, sexual exploitation and poor sanitation.

• Bibby Line Group is more than 90% owned by members of the Bibby family, primarily through trusts. Its pre-tax profits for 2021 stood at almost £31m, which they upped to £35.5m by claiming generous tax credits and deferring a fair amount to the following year.

• Management aboard the vessel will be overseen by an Australian business travel services company, Corporate Travel Management, who have previously had aspersions cast over the financial health of their operations and the integrity of their business practices.

• Another beneficiary of the initiative is Langham Industries, a maritime and engineering company whose owners, the Langham family, have longstanding ties to right wing parties.

Key Issues

According to the Home Office, the Bibby Stockholm barge will be operational for at least 18 months, housing approximately 500 single adult men while their claims are processed, with “24/7 security in place on board, to minimise the disruption to local communities.” These measures appear to have been to dissuade opposition from the local Conservative council, who pushed for background checks on detainees and were reportedly even weighing legal action out of concern for a perceived threat of physical attacks from those housed onboard, as well as potential attacks from the far right against migrants held there.

Local campaigners have taken aim at the initiative, noting in the open letter:

“For many people seeking asylum arriving in the UK, the sea represents a site of significant trauma as they have been forced to cross it on one or more occasions. Housing people on a sea barge – which we argue is equal to a floating prison – is morally indefensible, and threatens to re-traumatise a group of already vulnerable people.”

Technically, migrants on the barge will be able to leave the site. However, in reality they will be under significant levels of surveillance and cordoned off behind fences in the high security port area.

If they leave, there is an expectation they will return by 11pm, and departure will be controlled by the authorities. According to the Home Office:

“In order to ensure that migrants come and go in an orderly manner with as little impact as possible, buses will be provided to take those accommodated on the vessel from the port to local drop off points”.

These drop off points are to be determined by the government, while being sited off the coast of Dorset means they will be isolated from centres of support and solidarity.

Meanwhile, the government’s new Illegal Migration Bill is designed to provide a legal justification for the automatic detention of refugees crossing the Channel. If it passes, there’s a chance this might set the stage for a change in regime on the Bibby Stockholm – from that of an “accommodation centre” to a full-blown migrant prison.

An initial release from the Home Office suggested the local voluntary sector would be engaged “to organise activities that keep occupied those being accommodated, potentially involved in local volunteering activity,” though they seemed to have changed the wording after critics said this would mean detainees could be effectively exploited for unpaid labour. It’s also been reported the vessel required modifications in order to increase capacity to the needed level, raising further concerns over cramped living conditions and a lack of privacy.

Bibby Line Group has prior form in border profiteering. From 1994 to 1998, the Bibby Stockholm was used to house the homeless, some of whom were asylum seekers, in Hamburg, Germany. In 2005, it was used to detain asylum seekers in the Netherlands, which proved a cause of controversy at the time. Undercover reporting revealed a number of cases abuse on board, such as beatings and sexual exploitation, as well suicide attempts, routine strip searches, scabies and the death of an Algerian man who failed to receive timely medical care for a deteriorating heart condition. As the undercover security guard wrote:

“The longer I work on the Bibby Stockholm, the more I worry about safety on the boat. Between exclusion and containment I encounter so many defects and feel so much tension among the prisoners that it no longer seems to be a question of whether things will get completely out of hand here, but when.”

He went on:

“I couldn’t stand the way prisoners were treated […] The staff become like that, because the whole culture there is like that. Inhuman. They do not see the residents as people with a history, but as numbers.”

Images of the Bibby Stockholm in 2007, while it was being used as a migrant detention centre in the Netherlands. Images: Joke Kaviaar via Indymedia NL

Discussions were also held in August 2017 over the possibility of using the vessel as accommodation for some 400 students in Galway, Ireland, amid the country’s housing crisis. Though the idea was eventually dropped for lack of mooring space and planning permission requirements, local students had voiced safety concerns over the “bizarre” and “unconventional” solution to a lack of rental opportunities.

Corporate Travel Management & Langham Industries

Although leased from Bibby Line Group, management aboard the Bibby Stockholm itself will be handled by Corporate Travel Management (CTM), a global travel company specialising in business travel services. The Australian-headquartered company also recently received a £100m contract for the provision of accommodation, travel, venue and ancillary booking services for the housing of Ukrainian refugees at local hotels and aboard cruise ships M/S Victoria and M/S Ambition. The British Red Cross warned earlier in May against continuing to house refugees on ships with “isolated” and “windowless” cabins, and said the scheme had left many “living in limbo.”

Founded by CEO Jamie Pherous, CTM was targeted in 2018 by VGI Partners, a group of short-sellers, who identified more than 20 red flags concerning the company’s business interests. Most strikingly, the short-sellers said they’d attended CTM’s offices in Glasgow, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Switzerland. Finding no signs of business activity there, they said it was possible the firm had significantly overstated the scale of its operations. VGI Partners also claimed CTM’s cash flows didn’t seem to add up when set against the company’s reported growth, and that CTM hadn’t fully disclosed revisions they’d made to their annual revenue figures.

Two years later, the short-sellers released a follow-up report, questioning how CTM had managed to report a drop in rewards granted for high sales numbers to travel agencies, when in fact their transaction turnover had grown during the same period. They also accused CTM of dressing up their debt balance to make their accounts look healthier.

CTM denied VGI Partners’ allegations. In their response, they paraphrased a report by auditors EY, supposedly confirming there were no question marks over their business practices, though the report itself was never actually made public. They further claim VGI Partners, as short-sellers, had only released the reports in the hope of benefitting from uncertainty over CTM’s operations.

Despite these troubles, CTM’s market standing improved drastically earlier this year, when it was announced the firm had secured contracts for the provision of travel services to the UK Home Office worth in excess of $3bn AUD (£1.6bn). These have been accompanied by further tenders with, among others, the National Audit Office, HS2, Cafcass, Serious Fraud Office, Office of National Statistics, HM Revenue & Customs, National Health Service, Ministry of Justice, Department of Education, Foreign Office, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The Home Office has not released any figures on the cost of either leasing or management services aboard Bibby Stockholm, though press reports have put the estimated price tag at more than £20,000 a day for charter and berthing alone. If accurate, this would put the overall expenditure for the 18-month period in which the vessel will operate as a detention centre at almost £11m, exclusive of actual detention centre management costs such as security, food and healthcare.

Another beneficiary of the project are Portland Port’s owners, Langham Industries, a maritime and engineering company owned by the Langham family. The family has long-running ties to right-wing parties. Langham Industries donated over £70,000 to the UK Independence Party from 2003 up until the 2016 Brexit referendum. In 2014, Langham Industries donated money to support the re-election campaign of former Clacton MP for UKIP Douglas Carswell, shortly after his defection from the Conservatives. Catherine Langham, a Tory parish councillor for Hilton in Dorset, has described herself as a Langham Industries director (although she is not listed on Companies House). In 2016 she was actively involved in local efforts to support the campaign to leave the European Union. The family holds a large estate in Dorset which it uses for its other line of business, winemaking.

At present, there is no publicly available information on who will be providing security services aboard the Bibby Stockholm.

Images from a 2007 protest against the use of the Bibby Stockholm as a detention centre in the Netherlands. Images: Joke Kaviaar via Indymedia NL

Business Basics

Bibby Line Group describes itself as “one of the UK’s oldest family owned businesses,” operating in “multiple countries, employing around 1,300 colleagues, and managing over £1 billion of funds.” Its head office is registered in Liverpool, with other headquarters in Scotland, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Malaysia, France, Slovakia, Czechia, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Nigeria (see the appendix for more). The company’s primary sectors correspond to its three main UK subsidiaries:

• Bibby Financial Services. A global provider of financial services. The firm provides loans to small- and medium-sized businesses engaged in business services, construction, manufacturing, transportation, export, recruitment and wholesale markets. This includes invoice financing, export and trade finance, and foreign exchanges. Overall, the subsidiary manages more than £6bn each year on behalf of some 9,000 clients across 300 different industry sectors, and in 2021 it brought in more than 50% of the group’s annual turnover.

• Bibby Marine Limited. Owner and operator of the Bibby WaveMaster fleet, a group of vessels specialising in the transport and accommodation of workers employed at remote locations, such as offshore oil and gas sites in the North Sea. Sometimes, as in the case of Chevron’s Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) project in Nigeria, the vessels are used as an alternative to hotels owing to a “a volatile project environment.” The fleet consists of 40 accommodation vessels similar in size to the Bibby Stockholm and a smaller number of service vessels, though the share of annual turnover pales compared to the group’s financial services operations, standing at just under 10% for 2021.

• Garic Ltd. Confined to construction, quarrying, airport, agriculture and transport sectors in the UK, the firm designs, manufactures and purchases plant equipment and machinery for sale or hire. Garic brought in around 14% of Bibby Line Group’s turnover in 2021.

Prior to February 2021, Bibby Line Group also owned Costcutter Supermarkets Group, before it was sold to Bestway Wholesale to maintain liquidity amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In their report for that year, the company’s directors also suggested grant funding from MarRI-UK, an organisation facilitating innovation in maritime technologies and systems, had been important in preserving the firm’s position during the crisis.

History

The Bibby Line Group’s story begins in 1807, when Lancashire-born shipowner John Bibby began trading out of Liverpool with partner John Highfield. By the time of his death in 1840, murdered while returning home from dinner with a friend in Kirkdale, Bibby had struck out on his own and come to manage a fleet of more than 18 ships. The mysterious case of his death has never been solved, and the business was left to his sons John and James.

Between 1891 and 1989, the company operated under the name Bibby Line Limited. Its ships served as hospital and transport vessels during the First World War, as well as merchant cruisers, and the company’s entire fleet of 11 ships was requisitioned by the state in 1939.

By 1970, the company had tripled its overseas earnings, branching into ‘factoring’, or invoice financing (converting unpaid invoices into cash for immediate use via short-term loans) in the early 1980s, before this aspect of the business was eventually spun off into Bibby Financial Services. The group acquired Garic Ltd in 2008, which currently operates four sites across the UK.

Images from a 2007 protest against the use of the Bibby Stockholm as a detention centre in the Netherlands. Images: Joke Kaviaar via Indymedia NL

People

Jonathan Lewis has served as Bibby Line Group’s Managing and Executive Director since January 2021, prior to which he acted as the company’s Chief Financial and Strategy Officer since joining in 2019. Previously, Lewis worked as CFO for Imagination Technologies, a tech company specialising in semiconductors, and as head of supermarket Tesco’s mergers and acquisitions team. He was also a member of McKinsey’s European corporate finance practice, as well as an investment banker at Lazard. During his first year at the helm of Bibby’s operations, he was paid £748,000. Assuming his role at the head of the group’s operations, he replaced Paul Drescher, CBE, then a board member of the UK International Chamber of Commerce and a former president of the Confederation of British Industry.

Bibby Line Group’s board also includes two immediate members of the Bibby family, Sir Michael James Bibby, 3rd Bt. and his younger brother Geoffrey Bibby. Michael has acted as company chairman since 2020, before which he had occupied senior management roles in the company for 20 years. He also has external experience, including time at Unilever’s acquisitions, disposals and joint venture divisions, and now acts as president of the UK Chamber of Shipping, chairman of the Charities Trust, and chairman of the Institute of Family Business Research Foundation.

Michael Bibby

Geoffrey Bibby

Geoffrey has served as a non-executive director of the company since 2015, having previously worked as a managing director of Vast Visibility Ltd, a digital marketing and technology company. In 2021, the Bibby brothers received salaries of £125,000 and £56,000 respectively.

The final member of the firm’s board is David Anderson, who has acted as non-executive director since 2012. A financier with 35 years experience in investment banking, he’s founder and CEO of EPL Advisory – which advises company boards on requirements and disclosure obligations of public markets – and chair of Creative Education Trust, a multi-academy trust comprising 17 schools. Anderson is also chairman at multinational ship broker Howe Robinson Partners, which recently auctioned off a superyacht seized from Dmitry Pumpyansky, after the sanctioned Russian businessman reneged on a €20.5m loan from JP Morgan. In 2021, Anderson’s salary stood at £55,000.

Images from a 2007 protest against the use of the Bibby Stockholm as a detention centre in the Netherlands. Images: Joke Kaviaar via Indymedia NL

Ownership

Bibby Line Group’s annual report and accounts for 2021 state that more than 90% of the company is owned by members of the Bibby family, primarily through family trusts. These ownership structures, effectively entities allowing people to benefit from assets without being their registered legal owners, have long attracted staunch criticism from transparency advocates given the obscurity they afford means they often feature extensively in corruption, money laundering and tax abuse schemes.

According to Companies House, the UK corporate registry, between 50% and 75% of Bibby Line Group’s shares and voting rights are owned by Bibby Family Company Limited, which also retains the right to appoint and remove members of the board. Directors of Bibby Family Company Limited include both the Bibby brothers, as well as a third sibling, Peter John Bibby, who’s formally listed as the firm’s ‘ultimate beneficial owner’ (i.e. the person who ultimately profits from the company’s assets).

Other people with comparable shares in Bibby Family Company Limited are Mark Rupert Feeny, Philip Charles Okell, and Lady Christine Maud Bibby. Feeny’s occupation is listed as solicitor, with other interests in real estate management and a position on the board of the University of Liverpool Pension Fund Trustees Limited. Okell meanwhile appears as director of Okell Money Management Limited, a wealth management firm, while Lady Bibby, Michael and Geoffrey’s mother, appears as “retired playground supervisor.”

Banner against the Bibby in Cornwall. Image: Cornwall Resists

Key Relationships

Bibby Line Group runs an internal ‘Donate a Day’ volunteer program, enabling employees to take paid leave in order to “help causes they care about.” Specific charities colleagues have volunteered with, listed in the company’s Annual Review for 2021 to 2022, include:

• The Hive Youth Zone. An award-winning charity for young people with disabilities, based in the Wirral.

• The Whitechapel Centre. A leading homeless and housing charity in the Liverpool region, working with people sleeping rough, living in hostels, or struggling with their accommodation.

• Let’s Play Project. Another charity specialising in after-school and holiday activities for young people with additional needs in the Banbury area.

• Whitdale House. A care home for the elderly, based in Whitburn, West Lothian and run by the local council.

• DEBRA. An Irish charity set up in 1988 for individuals living with a rare, painful skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa, as well as their families.

• Reaching Out Homeless Outreach. A non-profit providing resources and support to the homeless in Ireland.

Various senior executives and associated actors at Bibby Line Group and its subsidiaries also have current and former ties to the following organisations:

• UK Chamber of Shipping

• Charities Trust

• Institute of Family Business Research Foundation

• Indefatigable Old Boys Association

• Howe Robinson Partners

• hibu Ltd

• EPL Advisory

• Creative Education Trust

• Capita Health and Wellbeing Limited

• The Ambassador Theatre Group Limited

• Pilkington Plc

• UK International Chamber of Commerce

• Confederation of British Industry

• Arkley Finance Limited (Weatherby’s Banking Group)

• FastMarkets Ltd, Multiple Sclerosis Society

• Early Music as Education

• Liverpool Pension Fund Trustees Limited

• Okell Money Management Limited

Finances

For the period ending 2021, Bibby Line Group’s total turnover stood at just under £260m, with a pre-tax profit of almost £31m – fairly healthy for a company providing maritime services during a global pandemic. Their post-tax profits in fact stood at £35.5m, an increase they would appear to have secured by claiming generous tax credits (£4.6m) and deferring a fair amount (£8.4m) to the following year.

Judging by their last available statement on the firm’s profitability, Bibby’s directors seem fairly confident the company has adequate financing and resources to continue operations for the foreseeable future. They stress their February 2021 sale of Costcutter was an important step in securing this, given it provided additional liquidity during the pandemic, as well as the funding secured for R&D on fuel consumption by Bibby Marine’s fleet.

Scandal Sheet

Bibby Line Group and its subsidiaries have featured in a number of UK legal proceedings over the years, sometimes as defendants. One notable case is Godfrey v Bibby Line, a lawsuit brought against the company in 2019 after one of their former employees died as the result of an asbestos-related disease.

In their claim, the executors of Alan Peter Godfrey’s estate maintained that between 1965 and 1972, he was repeatedly exposed to large amounts of asbestos while working on board various Bibby vessels. Although the link between the material and fatal lung conditions was established as early as 1930, they claimed that Bibby Line, among other things:

“Failed to warn the deceased of the risk of contracting asbestos related disease or of the precautions to be taken in relation thereto;

“Failed to heed or act upon the expert evidence available to them as to the best means of protecting their workers from danger from asbestos dust; [and]

“Failed to take all reasonably practicable measures, either by securing adequate ventilation or by the provision and use of suitable respirators or otherwise, to prevent inhalation of dust.”

The lawsuit, which claimed “unlimited damage”’ against the group, also stated that Mr Godfrey’s “condition deteriorated rapidly with worsening pain and debility,” and that he was “completely dependent upon others for his needs by the last weeks of his life.” There is no publicly available information on how the matter was concluded.

In 2017, Bibby Line Limited also featured in a leak of more than 13.4 million financial records known as the Paradise Papers, specifically as a client of Appleby, which provided “offshore corporate services” such as legal and accountancy work. According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative media outlets, leaked Appleby documents revealed, among other things, “the ties between Russia and [Trump’s] billionaire commerce secretary, the secret dealings of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief fundraiser and the offshore interests of the Queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world.”

This would not appear to be the Bibby group’s only link to the shady world of offshore finance. Michael Bibby pops up as a treasurer for two shell companies registered in Panama, Minimar Transport S.A. and Vista Equities Inc.

Looking Forward

Much about the Bibby Stockholm saga remains to be seen. The exact cost of the initiative and who will be providing security services on board, are open questions. What’s clear however is that activists will continue to oppose the plans, with efforts to prevent the vessel sailing from Falmouth to its final docking in Portland scheduled to take place on 30th June.

Call to action from Cornwall Resists

Appendix: Company Addresses

HQ and general inquiries: 3rd Floor Walker House, Exchange Flags, Liverpool, United Kingdom, L2 3YL

Tel: +44 (0) 151 708 8000

Other offices, as of 2021:

6, Shenton Way, #18-08A Oue Downtown 068809, Singapore

1/1, The Exchange Building, 142 St. Vincent Street, Glasgow, G2 5LA, United Kingdom

4th Floor Heather House, Heather Road, Sandyford, Dublin 18, Ireland

Unit 2302, 23/F Jubilee Centre, 18 Fenwick Street, Wanchai, Hong Kong

Unit 508, Fifth Floor, Metropolis Mall, MG Road, Gurugram, Haryana, 122002 India

Suite 7E, Level 7, Menara Ansar, 65 Jalan Trus, 8000 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

160 Avenue Jean Jaures, CS 90404, 69364 Lyon Cedex, France

Prievozská 4D, Block E, 13th Floor, Bratislava 821 09, Slovak Republic

Hlinky 118, Brno, 603 00, Czech Republic

Laan Van Diepenvoorde 5, 5582 LA, Waalre, Netherlands

Hansaallee 249, 40549 Düsseldorf, Germany

Poland Eurocentrum, Al. Jerozolimskie 134, 02-305 Warsaw, Poland

1/2 Atarbekova str, 350062, Krasnodar, Krasnodar

1 St Peter’s Square, Manchester, M2 3AE, United Kingdom

25 Adeyemo Alakija Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria

10 Anson Road, #09-17 International Plaza, 079903 Singapore

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For analysis on the previous year’s flights, see here.

The flights and the people

In terms of destinations, deportation charter flights in 2022 followed similar patterns to 2021 and previous years. Albania was by far the most frequent destination, with 35 flights deporting approximately 900 people, more than all other nationalities combined. Next were three EU countries: Romania, Poland and Lithuania, receiving 11, 8 and 5 flights, for an approximate total of 300, 145 and 94 people respectively. Flights to Ghana and Nigeria (21 people), Jamaica (7 people), Vietnam (40 people) and Zimbabwe (2 flights, 35 people) accounted for the rest. Five flights scheduled to Iraq, Jamaica, Lithuania, Poland and Rwanda were cancelled.

The most recent immigration statistics published by the Home Office state that the “vast majority of enforced returns” were of so-called Foreign National Offenders (“FNO”). These were overwhelmingly to European countries, but also included Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. The Windrush scandal showed how deportations to these post-colonial territories are systemically racist in nature, and particularly susceptible to procedural abuse. Many of those on the planes will be more at home in the UK than anywhere else, regardless of any irregularities in their immigration status.

The use of charter flights to deport criminalised people is a point we are continually reminded of by politicians to serve as their self-evident justification. Home Office propaganda focuses on the sometimes severe crimes of a few deportees. Yet according to activists and detainee support groups, such as volunteers with the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detention, most people are picked up for minor offences. Many deportees on these flights have human trafficking claims, and many have lived most of their lives in the UK. Despite extensive community ties, these people nevertheless face the additional punishment of becoming completely cut off from those communities after serving their criminal sentence.

There is also an ever-increasing conflation of so-called “foreign criminals” and asylum seekers. The Nationality and Borders Act, which entered into force last summer, criminalised “irregular arrival” so that anyone who comes autonomously to the UK to seek asylum can readily be declared and convicted as a criminal. This intentional confusion between asylum seekers and foreign criminals was evident in reporting on the cancelled Iraq flight; comments from the Home Office meant it was originally described as carrying foreign criminals, when those due to fly were later found to be refused asylum seekers.

Over the years we have seen how the government targets huge numbers of people ahead of a charter flight in the hope that not all will be able to receive the timely legal advice needed to stay their deportation. The 18 May charter flight to Jamaica was originally scheduled for more than 100 people, but left with just seven on board after many were able to cancel their deportation pending a legal review. Several dozen detainees at Colnbrook IRC, not due to be deported that day, had also protested the flight inside the detention centre in a bid to prevent three people from being taken.

Targeting Albanians

The Home Office’s immigration statistics report shows that Albanians accounted for 25% of total “enforced returns” from the UK, as well as a majority of FNO deportations. The deportation of Albanians, not only as “criminals” but “Channel crossers”, was key to Home Office propaganda throughout the last year showing its resolve to “stop the boats”. The Refugee Council estimated that 15,569 Albanians crossed the Channel in 2022 – by far the leading nationality – but they had an asylum acceptance rate at first decision of just 16%. Unable to deport asylum seekers from other countries due largely to the ending of the Dublin mechanism after Brexit – a spectacular own goal for previous Conservative governments – the deportation of Albanian asylum seekers has become a convenient substitute.

Albanians have become a catch-all scapegoat for the Home Office, which simultaneously alludes to them as dangerous foreign criminals, bogus asylum seekers and Channel crossers in its press releases and social media posts. The current rhetoric against Albanians is openly persecutory, with Minister of Immigration Robert Jenrick recently celebrating:

“the fantastic staff who are working round the clock to find the Albanians, to detain them, to put them onto coaches, to take them to the airport and get them back to Tirana“.

Following on previous agreements, in December the UK and Albanian governments agreed a new deal which would reportedly allow “13,000 who crossed the Channel last year to be removed from Britain on weekly deportation flights” by fast-tracking asylum claims and prohibiting Albanians from accessing modern slavery protections. We expect Albanians to continue being a prime target for deportation charter flights into 2023, with Rishi Sunak recently telling Piers Morgan they will “ratchet up over the year”.

The companies

Two airlines raked in almost all of the money doing deportations for the Home Office in 2022: Spanish airline Privilege Style, and Stansted-based Titan Airways. Both should be well-known to anti-deportation activists, and have been lining their pockets helping successive British and other European governments ruin people’s lives for years. These two companies have proven themselves consistently the UK’s most frequent deporters, and key cogs in this misery machine.

In 2022 these two airlines lent their aircraft and crew to the Home Office 46 times, three-quarters of all mass deportation flights. But analysing the flight numbers of the mass deportations we identified shows aircraft from other companies flying under Titan (AWC) and Privilege Style (PVG) codes. This implies that these two companies sometimes subcontract out their dirty work, and were potentially responsible for 54 – or 87% – of flights overall (4).

The government seems to have turned to other companies for its less frequent and much longer deportations to countries like Zimbabwe and Vietnam. The other airlines identified deported people to countries beyond the weekly flights to Albania and EU member states, and were likely to have been contracted through deportation fixer Air Partner (see more in our recent profile here). Hi Fly, the Portuguese charter airline which led the Home Office’s pre-Brexit drive of asylum seekers in late 2020, deported seven people to Jamaica on 18 May and then nine people to Zimbabwe on 7 September. It also appears to have used its partner flyPOP’s plane 9H-PTP to deport a total of 21 people to Ghana and Nigeria in June.

Hi Fly appeared to have silently stepped back from deportation charters after being exposed by Corporate Watch in 2020, but has since proven it is still happy to go the distance to tear apart a family for the Home Office, despite its proclaimed support for refugee causes.

Iberojet, formerly Evelop!, is another Spanish airline with a history of collaboration with the Home Office. Last year it deported 40 people to Vietnam in January, and 26 to Zimbabwe in March (see our 2021 profile on Iberojet/Evelop! here). Along with Air Nostrum, Iberojet has just been awarded another contract to carry out Spain’s deportation flights for the next 16 months.

There was one exception to the above pattern. In November a new airline began performing deportation work on the regular Albania route for the Home Office: Corendon Airlines. According to the Berlin-based No Border Assembly and their Deportation Alarm project, the holiday airline first entered the charter deportation market during the 2020 Covid pandemic. The company headquarters are in Turkey and Malta, however its Dutch subsidiary, Corendon Dutch Airlines, flies all its deportation charters for the company, often with the same Boeing 737-registered PH-CDH. Apart from its three flights last year, at the time of writing Corendon has already flown two deportation charter flights for the Home Office in 2023 (Romania on 31 January and Albania on 16 February). This company, a proven deportation provider to EU states, may continue to carry out work for the Home Office in future as it appears to be a cheaper alternative than its former go-to charter firms, Titan and Privilege Style.

The cancelled Rwanda flight

Despite regular deportation flights taking off each week, public consciousness of the UK’s deportation planes in 2022 was dominated by one which never took off: Privilege Style’s scheduled flight from Boscombe Down MOD to Kigali, Rwanda. Investigations revealed that the people forced onto that plane were physically attached to their seats with waist restraint belts by Mitie guards who used “pain-inducing techniques” to stop them self-harming as a way to resist their expulsion. The Privilege Style crews may have heard, if not directly witnessed, this torture, but still appeared willing to take off nonetheless. Luckily this flight was halted by an eleventh-hour intervention by the European Court of Human Rights, and no other has been scheduled while the UK’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is undergoing legal challenges in the courts.

Following campaigning from anti-deportation activists in the UK and Spain—including interrupting the World Aviation Festival and going to Privilege Style’s headquarters to present it the “Worst Airline in the World Award” (a golden plane crashing into a pile of shit) Privilege Style announced on 18 October that they would not fly any future deportation flights to Rwanda. While Titan and AirTanker have made similar statements, Hi Fly and Iberojet refuse to make the same commitment. However, Privilege Style’s apparent change of tune on Rwanda in the face of public pressure did not stop it from continuing to fly deportations for the Home Office (or other European countries). In fact, just the day after its announcement it deported 32 people to Albania, followed by another three deportations to Poland and Albania within the next month.

After 17 November there were no further deportation charter flights flown by Privilege Style from the UK in 2022. This led some to wonder if the “Home Office’s deportation airline of last resort” had pulled out of the market for good, or perhaps was being punished for withdrawing its cooperation for flights to Rwanda. But on 2 February 2023, Privilege Style again flew another mass deportation to Albania – proving it remains one of Europe’s most unabashed deportation profiteers, so far unfazed by collective actions.

The money

The costs to the Home Office for all its chartered deportation flights in 2022 are as follows:

The per monthly breakdown for the final four months of the year is:

Based on the FOI data, we estimate that the total yearly costs for the 62 flights (plus five cancelled) to have been £12,145,000 (5), slightly more than the £11,744,522.33 from 2021. This excludes fees paid to Mitie for the guards to keep the people in their seats (at least three “escorts” per deportee), as well as other costs which may have been billed to the Home Office later. We estimate the average per-flight cost in 2022 to have been £180,000, but the real costs will fluctuate depending upon the destination and airline, amongst other factors.

This year’s data provided more insight into per-flight costs than previous investigations. Flights to distant destinations cost the Home Office substantially more than deportations to European countries. Costs in November were £100,000 higher than December despite being for basically the same four flights, three to Albania and a fourth to Romania. The difference: a plane had been scheduled to deport people to Jamaica on 9 November. This flight was cancelled, and would have likely cost substantially more had it gone ahead.

Cancelled flights therefore still entail significant costs. 19 flights were scheduled in both the three-month period June to September and the four-month period September to January. Total costs were £40,000 more in the earlier period despite the cancellation of two more flights, including Privilege Style’s planned deportation to Rwanda.

We can also see that charter airlines like Privilege Style or Titan that brag about serving VIPs, politicians, sports teams and the like are the most expensive, yet are still used most often. Comparing average costs in October (£176,407.86) to December (£143,937.30) we see that per-flight costs were around £30,000 lower in December for similar destinations. The difference this time: deportations in December were carried out by Corendon, and not Privilege Style (other than the two constants done by Titan each month).

Looking ahead

Charter deportations represent a minority of all deportations from the UK (6). Deportation charters have been consistently criticised for their exorbitant costs alongside the relatively small number of deportees who end up on the flights after people make their cases for remaining in the UK to the courts. However, claiming per-flight costs are too high or the number of people is too low to justify specially chartering an entire plane misses the point of these mass deportations. Above all, they are meant to serve as spectacular displays of immigration enforcement action for the government in power at the time. For a premium, ministers get to Tweet regularly about mass deportations of foreign criminals and other scapegoats to prove to anti-migrant constituents their dedication to stopping “illegal immigration” or punishing those who “game the asylum system”.

Aside from pandering to their base, the Home Office is also likely happy to fork over huge sums for deportation charters because it imagines that they deter others from coming to the UK. Since at least August 2020, rapid response deportation attempts have been a key tactic to “stop the boats”, and were recently reprioritised by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. However, as small boat arrivals continue to rise year-on-year, while only generating 45% of total asylum claims in 2022, this strategy has proven not only unsuccessful but unnecessary. The Rwanda plan which was supposed to deliver a deterrent effect has apparently not fazed anyone waiting in France for their chance to cross, but rather only re-traumatised survivors of torture and led others who have had to flee to the UK for their lives to now contemplate suicide here.

In lieu of the dramatic Rwanda charter deportations Home Secretary Suella Braverman “dreams” of seeing, last year shows the much more mundane (but no less violent and abusive) reality of a charter deportation system churning through our communities each week. Albanians are currently prime targets, but this could easily become other nationalities and cohorts, especially as the predominant nationalities of Channel crossers shift. We saw glimpses of this last year with the deportation charter flights to Vietnam in January and then the cancelled flight (for “operational reasons”) of Kurdish people to Iraq in May, the first planned flight to the country in a decade. These came off the back of the large number of Vietnamese people and Iraqis travelling to the UK by boat in late 2021 and early 2022, and, like deportations to Albania, could be intended to dissuade others from those specific countries from following.

Although deportations to Rwanda are currently not happening due to legal challenges, and there is no longer a returns agreement for European countries, we know the government is keen to negotiate other “third-country” agreements for the deportation of asylum seekers. It is now clearing the legal ground necessary to do such returns at scale with its recently-published Illegal Migration Bill, currently in its second reading in the House of Commons.

If efforts to allow the mass deportation of people who have not even had the opportunity to seek asylum are ever successful, we must assume that the government will make full use of charter flights if for no other reason than for the dramatic statement that a deportation plane taking off makes. The bottom line, however, is that for these flights to go ahead, someone has to be willing to fly them. We saw last year that even the very worst companies can be pushed into refusing to carry out this work through sustained international action. Therefore we must continue to pressure all the deportation profiteers to ensure that when the Home Office tries to carry out its next deportation charter, there is no one left they can turn to to help them do it.

Appendix

The post 2022 UK charter deportations: a balance sheet appeared first on Corporate Watch.

In this update of our company investigation on Mitie, we found that:

• In the last financial year, it reported a record annual turnover of around £4 billion, up 58% since 2021.
• Mitie runs 50% of the Home Office’s migrant detention facilities. It also supplies the guards that enforce Home Office deportations. Earlier in 2022, Mitie was investigated for “suspected anti-competitive conduct” after winning yet more lucrative detention deals, although this investigation is now closed.
• Mitie’s largest single shareholders, Stephen and Caroline Butt, donated £52,000 to the Conservative Party between 2015 and 2021.
• It has had a track record of paying low wages and attempting to pay workers less than minimum wage, especially when it worked in the business of care homes.
• A huge area of profit growth comes from the chilling push towards increased surveillance technology across many sectors.

Do you have any information you’d like to share about Mitie? Get in touch!

Business basics

In the 2022 financial year, Mitie Group Plc recorded a record annual turnover of around £4 billion, up 58% since 2021. Just over a third (38%) of its sales are to business customers. Mitie’s customer range is vast, ranging from retailers including Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Ikea, to the BBC, major banks, defence companies and a raft of government departments. Profit and shareholder returns have been rising, in part through securing significant government contracts during the pandemic, and also since it bought Interserve for £120 million in 2020. This year has seen the company secure £2.1 billion in new contract wins, more than in the past three years combined.

Mitie employs around 72,000 people. Its head office is in London, with regional offices around the UK. According to the 2022 annual report, it has some small subsidiaries registered in other European countries, in Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana) and in the United Arab Emirates. However, over 95% of its turnover comes from the UK.

Profit margins differ between Mitie’s business areas but detention is amongst the most lucrative. The company’s services are grouped into several divisions. These are, in order of revenue in the 2022 annual report:

• Business Services (£1.5 billion). This division delivers security, cleaning and office services. It generated £429 million from Covid-related government contracts providing testing centres and security in quarantine hotels. It also began a contract worth over £53 million in September 2022 to provide security services at Home Office ‘contingency accommodation’ centres. It recently launched ‘Mitie Intelligence Services’, which allegedly “integrates intelligence, technology and people”. Key clients for this sector include the BBC, B&Q, Marks & Spencer, BAE Systems and Transport for London. See below for more detail on this sector.
• Central Government and Defence (£669 million). Mitie continues to win lucrative government contracts. This includes maintenance for “1% of the UK land mass” reserved for defence training. Mitie also has a contract with the DWP ‘helping’ people who lost work during the pandemic.
• Communities (£460 million) This division focuses primarily on healthcare, education and is providing an increasing number of outsourcing services to universities.
• Technical Services (£973 million) Working mainly in the private sector, but since the buyout of Interserve this division is now picking up PFI contracts. According to Mitie, this sector provides clients with “solutions to their Green Energy, Decarbonisation, Connected Workspace and Mobile Telecoms challenges”.
• Specialist Services (£373 million).  Specialist services’ operating profit is 8.8% – the highest for all divisions. The majority of this comes via Care & Custody providing “public services in immigration, criminal justice and secure healthcare”, revenue for which has increased by 25% to £136 million. The Care & Custody sector has contracts worth nearly £518 million on the order book, up from almost £445 million in 2021.

It’s pretty much certain that most people in the UK will shop at, or use services that help keep Mitie’s profit margins up.

Cashing in on Covid

Mitie cashed in on the pandemic when it was in big financial trouble. But when Covid hit, Mitie’s fortunes turned around. It sucked up lucrative government contracts and managed to halt profit warnings.

Despite these lucrative contracts, workers at a Mitie test centre caught Covid in January 2021, raised the alarm and questioned safety measures. The firm claimed that it followed test and trace guidance and the site was deep cleaned. Meanwhile, Mitie also provided cleaners to hostels for Southwark Council who worked for poverty wages without adequate PPE. And despite raking in millions from Covid-related work, in November 2021 it slashed workers’ guaranteed pay by a third at mobile test and trace units. This came only weeks before the World Health Organisation classified Omicron as a variant of concern.

Even post-pandemic, Mitie’s record 2022 turnover was still boosted by nearly £48 million from ongoing Covid-related deals.

Key Issues

Detention profiteering: “Mitie Care and Custody”

The scale of Mitie’s immigration work makes the company one of the most significant profiteers from the UK border regime. Although it may not like to highlight its detention and deportation work, Mitie has been actively pursuing new contracts in this sector. The new deportation “escorting” contract doubled revenues in the area, and it continues to scoop up new detention centre contracts as they come up for re-tendering. Yet, the company is so vast that this segment still only represents about 3% of Mitie’s total revenue.

Nevertheless, revenue for this work has grown by 25% over the past year due to new or renewed immigration contracts. As of November 2022, Mitie runs the following immigration detention centres:

• Dungavel: a former Scottish prison which was converted into a detention centre in 2001. It has a capacity of 125 people and has been run by Mitie since 2021. According to the company’s latest annual report, the £66m contract runs for 8 years.

• Harmondsworth and Colnbrook: rebranded as ‘Heathrow Immigration Removal Centre’, now a single migrant mega-prison. With a capacity of 965 people, Mitie doesn’t like to call this a prison and instead describes it as the “largest immigration removal centre in Europe”. Its contract, awarded in 2014, has been extended to November 2023. It may extend still further to a maximum of 11 years, for a total of £248.9m.

• Derwentside: Originally known as Hassockfield, Derwentside is an 84-bed women’s holding centre near Newcastle which opened in 2021. Mitie’s £16.6m contract began in June 2021 and lasts until June 2023.

Campsfield detention centre in Oxford, also formerly run by Mitie, closed in 2018. However, the government recently announced its intention to reopen the site in late 2023 at the earliest. Whether Mitie will snap up the contract again remains to be seen.

In May 2018, the company won a £514m “escorting” contract, which runs until 2028. Its job is to supply guards to enforce each deportation from the UK and move migrants between detention centres and prisons. The work also includes the management of short-term holding rooms at ports, airports and immigration reporting centres; as well as contracts at short-term Home Office managed residential holding facilities such as Manston in Kent and Larne House in Northern Ireland.

Mitie security guards at Manston

Mitie also supplies custody officers to a number of police stations in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and while it does not currently run any regular prisons, it does provide “facilities management”, such as cleaning and catering. The company​​​ says these contracts involve working closely with the Home Office, “to help deal with the challenges in immigration services, including the ramp-up of services to deal with the increasing volume of small boat arrivals on the South Coast.”

As well as profiting from immigration services, the Care and Custody division has been milking the police custody cash cow further. In 2022 alone, it secured one contract of over £57 million for healthcare provision to South West police and another up to £7 million for “healthcare and forensic services within custody” with Derbyshire police.

Mitie, along with Interserve, now has a potential stake in contracts worth £4 billion as part of the Prison Operator Service Framework. As a result, it added ‘justice’ to the Care and Custody package and hopes to secure a share of £2.5 billion “from a buoyant pipeline including prisons management, a key growth market in the Justice sector”.

Technology

Like other outsourcers, Mitie has a double incentive to increase automation of its services: to cut labour costs and to compete with rivals by offering new “high tech” services. And as Mitie’s security contracts increase everywhere – from hospitals to university campuses and from shopping malls to refugee camps – it’s also carving out a chilling name for itself in surveillance technology.

In 2021, it bought Esoteric a “niche provider of leading counter espionage and specialist surveillance countermeasure services”. As a result, Mitie now owns:

The only UK company to be accredited by the National Security Inspectorate for both electronic sweeping and covert investigations… The acquisition builds on Mitie’s existing capabilities as the UK’s leading provider of technology and intelligence-led security services.

Alongside Esoteric, buying up Interserve has enabled Mitie to secure even more ‘intelligence-led’ contracts for Mitie Security, including “AI CCTV and facial recognition”. In 2021, the company also “introduced an industry-first Data-Sharing Agreement” allegedly to allow “retailers to share data on shoplifters, helping to tackle prolific offenders and organised crime groups more effectively”. Mitie’s huge investment in this area of technology alongside its presence in nearly every public space we enter, becomes more concerning by the day.

In June 2022, Big Brother Watch filed a legal complaint with the Information Commissioner after it emerged that 35 Southern Co-ops were using facial recognition in their supermarkets. This “Orwellian in the extreme” technology was provided by “surveillance firm Facewatch”. It is no surprise perhaps that Mitie has previously worked with Facewatch to develop CCTV for security in retail spaces. As a Big Brother Watch report on facial recognition highlights, although increasing surveillance from facial recognition threatens everyone’s civil liberties, it also discriminates against people of colour and women disproportionately. Facial recognition cameras in supermarkets may be just the tip of the iceberg since Mitie’s most recent annual report acknowledges the introduction of “cutting edge technology” – including facial recognition – for “existing and prospective customers”.

Another high-profile development has been the use of cleaning robots. Mitie has publicised the use of these in big contracts including Birmingham Airport,  Heathrow Airport and Hinchingbrooke Hospital. It introduced “autonomous scrubber-dryer robots” along with an electronic meal ordering system to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Elsewhere, Mitie has a partnership with Microsoft to work on using “Big Data” technologies in its facilities management and property services packages.

In 2019, CEO Phil Bentley acknowledged that the company’s “restructuring” and increased use of IT would “inevitably” impact some jobs. He continued:

That’s the reality. But that’s not the main story.

Does it mean fewer jobs or does it mean we are more productive and win more business? I’d like to think the latter.

“Moptimus Prime” cleaning robot at Hinchingbrooke hospital

In more detail

History

Mitie stands for the truly awful phrase: “Management Incentive Through Investment Equity”. It was started in 1987 in Bristol by two businessmen called David Telling and Ian Stewart. Its original business model was to buy 51% stakes to fund a range of companies, with the rest of the shares owned by the managers. Cleaning and “support services” were a focus, but Mitie has always had a loose range of business interests – basically, anything that looked like it could bring in a few quid.

Mitie’s detention “Care and Custody” business in fact started out as a car park company called Mitie Parking Services. But when a new director called Colin Sobell was appointed in 2009, the subsidiary changed its name and started chasing prison contracts. Sobell had previously run US prison company GEO’s UK operation, and before that worked for the detention company GSL (now part of G4S). Using his expertise and contacts, Mitie took the Campsfield detention contract over from GEO in 2011. Then in 2014, it won the Heathrow detention centres deal from Serco, suddenly becoming the UK’s biggest detention contractor. It’s been increasing and profiting from, detention contracts ever since.

This seemed easy enough in the pre-recession boom years when the rival outsourcing companies were all snapping up government services and busily expanding. Back in 2011, 37% of Mitie’s sales came from the public sector – another 34% from “energy services” sub-contracted from the big energy firms.

The wheels started to come off in 2015. Mitie got seriously stung by its ill-advised investment in the home care ‘market’. Mitie bought the Mihomecare business, previously called Enara, for £111 million in 2012, hoping to cash in on the ageing population. But in 2017 it sold it to a private equity buyer for a nominal £2, also handing over £9.45m to cover its losses. The business had depended on effectively paying care workers below the official minimum wage; now not only was the minimum wage rising, but Mitie was forced to actually pay it after workers campaigned and brought lawsuits. Mitie wasn’t able to pass on these rising costs to austerity-hit local authorities. Although the company now likes to emphasise that it has worked with the Living Wage Foundation since 2019, this wasn’t the case at that time.

Mitie people

Bosses

CEO Phil Bentley, a trained accountant from Bradford, was formerly Managing Director of British Gas (2007-13). He became well known to the media for giving frequent interviews where he was attacked for putting up household energy bills. He then left to become CEO of Miami-based telecoms firm Cable and Wireless. Bentley’s base salary is £900,000. But when you count his bonuses and pension allowance, he took home a hefty pay package of £3.8m in 2022. In fact, his profits have continued to rise, in 2021 he earned  £2.7m in 2021, up from £2m in 2021 following a £1.1m cash bonus and a £622,000 award from shares. Mitie’s latest annual report reveals that Bentley also owns stock shares valued at £1,800,000. However, a corporate data shows that the market value of his shares is £8.9 million.

Mitie’s links with the Conservative party are well known. Bentley’s predecessor was Tory peer, Baroness (Ruby) McGregor-Smith, CBE, who led the company for 10 years. MacGregor-Smith, an accountant, was recruited as finance director in 2002 and then made CEO in 2007. The first Asian woman to run a FTSE 250 company, she was later made a Conservative Baroness, and nicknamed the “prickly peer” by the Financial Times. Claiming to have a “passion” for outsourcing, she set out to grow the company with acquisitions and new contracts until it could rival the likes of Capita and her old employer Serco. McGregor-Smith was awarded her peerage in 2015 and left Mitie a year later. She now sits on the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee and was until recently President of the British Chamber of Commerce and a non-executive board member of the Department for Education.

Philippa Roe – aka Baroness Couttie – was another Tory Peer sitting at the top of the Mitie ladder; she passed away as we were writing this article. A non-executive director, Roe started her career in PR before moving into banking, where she enjoyed directorships at Schroders and Citigroup. From there she found her way into politics, serving as leader of Westminster City Council for five years as well as sitting on the London Crime Reduction Board. Both Roe and McGregor-Smith had unsuccessfully nominated themselves Tory candidates in the London mayoral elections.

Simon Venn is the company’s Chief Government & Strategy Officer and therefore presumably responsible for maintaining good relations with the state. Venn was described in a (now edited) page on Mitie’s website as “a senior advisor to the UK government”, who “was appointed in 2010 by the then Foreign Secretary, Sir William Hague MP, to sit on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s Overseas Business Risk (OBR) board”. Despite these apparently prominent roles, there is little publicly-available information on him. Like Bentley, he too served on the upper echelons of Cable & Wireless before that company got sold off.

Danny Spencer, has sat at the head of Mitie’s “Care and Custody” division for the past seven years. He is a former governor at HMP/YOI Littlehey in Cambridgeshire, and ex-Deputy Governor at HMP Liverpool.

Although the company looks set to achieve the dubious ‘Amazon of FM’ accolade, Mitie would likely prefer not to be reminded about Alloni’s tenure. He left Mitie with immediate effect in April 2022 following a “confidential plea bargain with the U.S. Department of Justice”. Although the investigation is ongoing, it relates to a leak of confidential documents alleging that between 2011 to 2019, telecoms giant Ericsson continued and extended its work in Iraq by paying bribes to the Islamic State and engaged in widespread corruption in ten countries. After the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) shared the leaked documents, Ericsson acknowledged “‘corruption-related misconduct’ in Iraq and possible payments to Isis”. Alloni was president of Ericsson’s North Africa division from 2010 and then a chief operating officer in charge of “all Ericsson’s operations in [the] Middle East” until 2013.

Shareholders

Corporate databases show that (at the time of writing), Mitie’s largest single shareholder is Silchester International Investors LLP owning 12.8%. The Silchester investment group, an international equity fund based in Mayfair, is ultimately controlled and owned by Stephen and Caroline Butt. Silchester International Investors LLP, dubbed the “quiet investors” has a diverse investment profile which, until recently, included Morrisons supermarket. In 2021, as the largest shareholder, 17 Silchester partners cashed in almost £111 million in dividends after the supermarket’s record sales during Covid-19.

According to its 2022 accounts, Silchester Partners Ltd reported a 16.7% jump in profits and a turnover of £128.6 million.  That year alone the Butt couple were paid a dividend of at least £69 million from the Silchester group. It’s no surprise that Stephen Butt – a former Morgan Stanley director – is now one of the UK’s richest fund managers according to The Sunday Times. Dabbling in philanthropy, the Butts are very giving: together donating a total of £52,000 to the Conservative Party between 2015 and 2021, with Caroline Butt alone donating £32,000. The rest of Silchester is owned by British and international backers, and the fund is known for making long-term investments in companies.

Next up is major global institutional investor Fidelity, which owns 10.7% of shares via Fidelity International Ltd and another 5.3% through FMR. Headquartered in Bermuda, a corporate paradise with no corporate tax, Fidelity is no doubt maxing out on its dividends from Mitie’s shady dealings. Ultimately run and owned by Abigail Johnson, the granddaughter of Fidelity’s founder, Johnson has a net worth of around $20 billion (£17 billion) and is listed by Forbes as the 72nd richest person in the world.

Like other PLCs, Mitie is mainly owned by international institutional investment funds. In 2018, when this profile was first published, shareholders were jumping ship as Mitie was in financial trouble. Around this time Fidelity reduced its stake from 9% in 2017. But Silchester was busy adding to its shares, spotting a lucrative opportunity – and it was proved right. At the time, Silchester already had a bigger stake than is usual for a single shareholder to have in outsourcing companies like Mitie.

In 2022, Mitie shared its record turnover with shareholders. Despite a dividend break in 2021, in the tax year ending in March 2022, shareholders secured dividend payments of £5.7 million. Meanwhile, Mitie’s directors discussed a further £19.5 million dividend payment in their AGM in June to keep shareholders sweet. The next company target is a 30-40% dividend payout for shareholders, up from 20% in 2022.

Finances

Outlook and strategies

Mitie currently earns nearly half its turnover through lucrative government contracts. These now total over £2.3 billion compared with over £1.7 billion from non-government contracts.

After its home care losses (see below), Mitie shifted its focus towards “core” Facilities Management (FM) business. Its model aimed to try and get companies to buy an “integrated” package of more services, and for longer contract periods.

So now, rather than just outsourcing particular jobs like cleaning, maintenance or security, Mitie advises companies on how it can take over running all their FM needs. It also brought in “new technology and analytics”.  The acquisition of Interserve in 2020 means Mitie is now one of the UK’s largest FM companies, since it retained 90% of the former Interserve contracts. In 2019, Carlo Alloni – ex-managing director of Mitie’s Technical Services division – openly stated Mitie’s intention to become the “Amazon of FM”. (See below for more detail on Alloni.)

In the latest annual report, Mitie boldly declared that since 2021, its new strategy is “focused on accelerating growth, enhancing margin and improving cash generation, underpinned by ‘capability enablers’”. What this actually means is huge executive bonuses and benefit packages alongside rising dividend payouts for shareholders.

For Mitie, climate catastrophe, ongoing wars and the spiralling cost of living crisis simply open new paths to profit. The Mitie leadership team openly admits that the government’s “decarbonisation agenda” and increased defence spending offer “good momentum” to “accelerate growth”. And, as the most recent financial accounts note:

Following the significant rise in gas and electricity costs, Technical Services is benefitting from increased activity in all areas of decarbonisation, including solar power, LED roll-outs, air source heat pump installation and electric vehicle charging projects.

Profit and growth:

Business is now booming. In 2022, Mitie’s record revenue of £4 billion created an operating profit of £167 million and a free cash flow of £133 million.

But prior to the pandemic, the company was on shaky ground. Until 2015, Mitie grew steadily, and in the previous five years made a constant overall operating profit margin of around 6%. Then trouble hit, and the company issued four profit warnings between March 2015 and January 2018. Although it reported profits in 2015/6, revenues were starting to fall, and it reported a loss in 2016/7. The company’s turnover shrunk from £2.4 billion in 2015 to £2.1 billion in 2017. Meanwhile, 2017/8 results showed that although turnover increased slightly to £2.2 billion, helped by new contracts, they actually made an overall loss in their accounts.

A number of official investigations were launched into aspects of Mitie’s previous financial reporting. Mitie’s 2017 accounts had to recalculate the figures it originally gave for 2016, recording its revenues and profits as lower. In 2016, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) investigated the timing of Mitie’s profit warning announcements. Another watchdog, the Financial Reporting Committee (FRC), opened an investigation into the “preparation and approval of the financial statements” for 2016 (now closed), and another into the auditing of Mitie’s 2015 and 2016 accounts by Deloitte.

Mitie Scandal Sheet

Mitie is not as high profile as its notorious rivals G4S and Serco. Most of its work has been in less controversial cleaning and maintenance, or for corporate clients. Though, this looks set to change as it pursues more profitable opportunities in detention and security.

(2022) Manston migrant camp hit the headlines after refugees – including children – were held for long periods in “terrible” and severely overcrowded conditions. Human rights campaigners and lawyers have now called for a public inquiry into the site following allegations from refugees about “systemic” abuse, violence and ill-treatment from staff. Complaints also flag “significant failures of planning and management” at the Home Office site.

(2022) The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into Mitie for “suspected anticompetitive conduct” following the award of yet more lucrative immigration detention deals. In December 2022, the CMA “provisionally” closed this investigation.

(2022) Allegations that Mitie Care and Custody staff sent racist messages in a WhatsApp group chat led to a Home Office investigation. Comments reportedly targeted Syrian refugees, Chinese people, Dianne Abbot and Priti Patel.

(2021) The company made millions from Covid-19 contracts. At its Inverness testing site, a “catalogue of failures” by the company contributed to staff falling ill.

(2017) Financial investigations: The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) investigated the timing of Mitie’s profit warning announcements in 2016. Another watchdog, the Financial Reporting Committee (FRC), opened an investigation into the “preparation and approval of the financial statements” for 2016, and another into the auditing of Mitie’s 2015 and 2016 accounts by Deloitte.

(2017) Mitie exits home care: Mitie eventually sold its MiHomecare business at a loss – after paying £112 million for it in 2012. One reason for losses was that it had finally been forced to pay staff the minimum wage.

(2015) MiHomecare scandal: Mitie’s home care business was hit with investigations and lawsuits after failing to pay carers the minimum wage and cutting short care visits. At least four local authority customers had raised concerns about care standards, while the Care Quality Commission (CQC) had rated at least one Mihomecare as “inadequate”.

(2015) Hospital failing standards: within months of winning a cleaning and catering contract for Royal Cornwall Hospitals, Mitie’s pay was docked for repeatedly failing to meet standards.

(2015) Harmondsworth conditions exposed: secret filming inside the Mitie-run detention centre, as part of an investigation by Corporate Watch, showed the misery inside after Mitie took over, cut services and increased bang-up hours under its new contract.

(2011) Campsfield: hunger strikes, suicide, and fire. There are plenty of horror stories from Mitie’s management of the Oxfordshire detention centre; we told some in this 2014 report.

Campsfield after the 2013 fire

Company addresses:

HQ and general enquiries: The Shard, Level 12, 32 London Bridge Street, Southwark, London, SE1 9SG

Tel: 0330 678 0710 Email: info@mitie.com

Regional offices:

1st Floor, The Chocolate Factory, Somerdale, Keynsham, BS31 2GJ

35 Duchess Road, Rutherglen, Glasgow, G73 1AU

650 Pavilion Drive, Northampton Business Park, Brackmills, Northampton, NN4 7SL

NB: unless other sources are stated, information comes from the company’s annual reports and accounts. The latest information can be found here on its website.

This article was updated on 18 January 2023 to address concerns flagged by Mitie’s PR department and to reflect the fact that Mitie is responsible for the management of security at Manston detention camp, not the whole site.

See also: 2015 profile from The Bristol Cable

The post Mitie detention profiteers: 2023 company profile appeared first on Corporate Watch.

International travel megacorp Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) holds a £5.7 million, seven-year contract with the Home Office for the “provision of travel services for immigration purposes”, as it has done for nearly two decades. However, a key part of its work – the chartering of aircraft and crew to carry out the deportations – has been subcontracted to a little-known aviation charter outfit called Air Partner.

Summary

Digging deeper into Air Partner, we found a company which has been quietly organising mass deportations for the Home Office for years. We also learnt that:

• It likely arranged for the airline Privilege Style to carry out the aborted flight to Rwanda, and will seek another airline if the Rwanda scheme goes ahead.
• It has organised deportation logistics for the US and several European governments.
• It is currently one of four beneficiaries of a €15 million framework contract to arrange charter deportations for the European Coast Guard and Border Agency, Frontex.
• The company grew off the back of military contracts, with profits soaring during the ‘War on Terror’, the Arab Spring, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Its regular clients include politicians, celebrities and sports teams, and it recently flew teams and fans to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
• Air Partner was bought in spring 2022 by American charter airline, Wheels Up, but that company is in troubled financial waters.

Air Partner: Home Office deportation broker

In Carlson Wagonlit’s current contract award notice, published on the EU website Tenders Electronic Daily, the “management and provision of aircraft(s) charter services” is subcontracted to Air Partner – a detail which is redacted in documents on the UK government’s procurement site. In other words, when the Home Office wants to carry out a mass deportation flight, the task of finding the airline is delegated to Air Partner.

The contract stipulates that for each charter flight, Air Partner must solicit bids from at least three potential airlines. Selection is on the basis of value for money. However, the contract also states that “the maximum possible flexibility “ is expected from the carrier in terms of dates and destinations. The winning bidder must also be morally comfortable with the work, although it is not clear at what point in the process a first-time deportation airline is fully informed of the nature of the task.

The contract suggests that airlines like Privilege Style, Titan Airways, Hi Fly and TUI, therefore, owe their entry into the UK deportation business to Air Partner, which effectively acts as gatekeeper to the sector. Meanwhile, Carlson Wagonlit books the tickets, oversees the overall operation, arranges deportations on scheduled flights, and liaises with the guards who physically enforce the expulsion (currently supplied by the company that runs Manston camp, Mitie, in a Home Office escorting contract that runs until 2028).

The latest deal between the Home Office and Carlson Wagonlit was awarded in 2017 and runs until 31st October 2024. It is likely that Air Partner makes money through a commission on each deportation flight.

Flying for Frontex

2021 deportation on a Privilege Style flight from Germany. Photo: Michael Trammer.

Yet Air Partner isn’t just the UK government’s deportation dealer. Its Austrian branch is currently one of four companies which organise mass expulsions for the European Coast Guard and Border Agency, Frontex, in a €15 million framework contract that was renewed in August 2022. A framework contract is essentially a deal in which a few companies are chosen to form a pool of select suppliers of particular goods or services, and are then called upon when needed. The work was awarded without advertising, which Frontex can do when the tender is virtually identical as in the previous contract.

Frontex organises deportation charter flights – either for multiple EU states at a time (where the plane stops to pick up deportees from several countries) – or for a single state. The Agency also arranges for individuals to be deported on regular commercial flights.

Air Partner’s work for Frontex is very similar to its work for the Home Office. It sources willing aircraft and crew, obtains flight and landing permits, and organises hotels – presumably for personnel – “in case of delays”. The other beneficiaries of the framework contract are Air Charter Service, Professional Aviation Solutions, and AS Aircontact.

Air Charter Service is a German company, sister of a Surrey-based business of the same name, and is owned by Knightsbridge private equity firm, Alcuin Capital Partners. Professional Aviation Solutions is another German charter company, owned by Skylink Holding. Finally, Norwegian broker AS Aircontact is a subsidiary of travel firm Aircontact Group, ultimately owned by chairman Johan Stenersen. AS Aircontact has benefited from the Frontex deal for many years.

The award was given to the four companies on the basis of lowest price, with each bidder having to state the price it was able to obtain for a range of specified flights. The companies then bid for specific deportations, with the winner being the one offering best value for money. Air Partner’s cut from the deal in 2021 was €2.7 million.

The contract stipulates the need for total secrecy:

[The contractor] Must apply the maximum discretion and confidentiality in relation to the activity… must not document or share information on the activity by any means such as photo, video, commenting or sharing in social media, or equivalent.

The Frontex award effectively means that Air Partner and the other three firms can carry out work on behalf of all EU states. But the company’s involvement with deportations doesn’t stop there: Air Partner has also profited for years from similar contracts with a number of individual European governments.

The company has done considerable work in Ireland, having been appointed as one of its official deportation brokers back in 2005. Ten years later, the Irish Department of Justice was recorded as having paid Air Partner to carry out a vaguely-described “air charter” job (on a web page that is no longer available), while in 2016 the same department paid Air Partner €240,000 for “returns air charter” – government-speak for deportation flights.

Between August 2021 and February 2022, the Austrian government awarded the company six Frontex-funded deportation contracts, worth an estimated average of €33,796.

The company also enjoys a deportation contract with the German government, in a deal reviewed annually. The current contract runs until February 2023.

Finally, Air Partner has held deportation contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has been involved in deporting Mexican migrants to the US as far back as the early 2000s.¹

Relationship with the airlines

In the first half of 2021, 22 of the EU’s 27 member states participated in Frontex flights, with Germany making far greater use of the ‘service’ than any other country. The geographic scale of Air Partner’s work gives an indication of the privileged access it has as gatekeeper to Europe’s lucrative ‘deportation market’, and ultimately, the golden land of government contracts more generally.

For example, British carrier Titan Airways – which has long carried out deportations for the Home Office – only appears to have broken into this market in Germany and Austria in 2018 and 2019, respectively. As Corporate Watch has documented, other airlines such as Privilege Style, AirTanker, Wamos and Iberojet (formerly, Evelop) regularly run deportation flights for a number of governments, including the UK. We can assume that Air Partner’s relationships with the firms are key to these companies’ ability to secure such deals in new markets.

Some of these relationships are clearly personal: Alastair Wilson, managing director of Titan Airways, worked as trading manager for Air Partner for seven years until he left that firm for Titan in 2014. By 2017, Titan was playing a major role in forcible expulsions from the UK.

The business: from military money to deportation dealer

Air Partner’s origins are in military work. Founded in 1961, the company started its life as a training centre which helped military pilots switch to the commercial sector. Known for much of its history as Air London, it has enjoyed extensive Ministry of Defence deals for troop rotations and the supply of military equipment. Up until 2010, military contracts represented over 60% of pre-tax profits. However, in recent years it has managed to wean itself off the MOD and develop a more diverse clientele; by 2018, the value of military contracts had dropped to less than 3% of profits.

The company’s main business is in brokering aircraft for charter flights, and sourcing planes from its pool of partner airlines at the request of customers who want to hire them. It owns no aircraft itself. Besides governments and wealthy individuals, its current client base includes “corporates, sports and entertainment teams, industrial and manufacturing customers, and tour operators.”

Its other source of cash is in training and consultancy to government, military and commercial customers through three subsidiaries: its risk management service Baines Simmons, the Redline Security project, and its disaster management sideline, Kenyon Emergency Services. Conveniently, while the group’s main business pumps out fossil fuels on needless private flights, Kenyon’s disaster management work involves among other things, preparing customers for climate change-induced natural disasters.

Despite these other projects, charter work represents the company’s largest income stream by far, at 87% of the group’s profits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of this is from leasing large jets to customers such as governments, sports teams and tour operators. Its second most lucrative source of cash is leasing private jets to the rich, including celebrities. Finally, its freight shipments tend to be the least profitable division of its charter work.

The company’s charter division continues to be “predominantly driven by government work”.² It has been hired by dozens of governments and royal families worldwide, and almost half the profits from its charter work now derive from the US, although France has long been an important market too.

Ferrying the mega-rich

Meanwhile, Air Partner’s work shuttling politicians and other VIPs no doubt enables the company to build up its bank of useful contacts which help it secure such lucrative government deals. Truly this is a company of the mega-rich: a “last-minute, half-term holiday” with the family to Madeira costs a mere £36,500 just for the experience of a private jet. It was the first aircraft charter company to have held a Royal Warrant, and boasts of having flown US election candidates and supplying George W Bush’s press plane.³

The “group charter” business works with bands and sports teams. The latter includes the Wales football team, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Real Madrid, while the Grand Prix is “always a firm fixture in the charter calendar”.⁴ It also flew teams and fans to the controversial 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.⁵

Crisis profiteer: the War on Terror, the Arab Spring & Covid-19

Air Partner has cashed in on one crisis after the next. Not only that, it even contributes to one, and in so doing multiplies its financial opportunities. As military contractor to belligerent Western forces in the Middle East, the company is complicit in the creation of refugees – large numbers of whom Air Partner would later deport back to those war zones. It feeds war with invading armies, then feasts on its casualties.

The company reportedly carried at least 4,000t of military supplies during the first Gulf War. The chairman at the time, Tony Mack, said:

The Gulf War was a windfall for us. We’d hate to say ‘yippee, we’re going to war’, but I guess the net effect would be positive.⁶

And in its financial records over the past twenty years, three events really stand out: 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’, the Arab Spring, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror was a game changer for the company, marking a departure from reliance on corporate customers and a shift to more secure government work. First – as with the pandemic – there was a boom in private jet hire due to “the number of rich clients who are reluctant to travel on scheduled services”.⁷

But more significant were the military contracts it was to obtain during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. During the occupation of Afghanistan, it “did a lot of freighting for the military”,⁸ while later benefiting from emergency evacuation work when coalition foreign policy came to its inevitably grim conclusion in 2021.

It enjoyed major military assignments with coalition forces in Iraq,⁹ with the UK’s eventual withdrawal resulting in a 19% drop in freight sales for the company. At one point, Air Partner lamented that its dip in profits was in part due to the temporary “cessation of official hostilities” and the non-renewal of its 2003 “Gulf contracts”.

9/11 and the aggression that followed was a boon for Air Partner’s finances. From 2001-02, pre-tax profits increased to then record levels, jumping 85% from £2.2 million to £4 million. And it cemented the company’s fortunes longer-term; a 2006 company report gives insight into the scale of the government work that went Air Partner’s way:

… over the last decade alone, many thousands of contracts worth over $500m have been successfully completed for the governments of a dozen Western Powers including six of the current G8 member states.

Two years on, Air Partner’s then-CEO, David Savile, was more explicit about the impact of the War on Terror:

Whereas a decade ago the team was largely servicing the Corporate sector, today it majors on global Government sector clients. Given the growing agenda of leading powers to pursue active foreign policies, work levels are high and in today’s climate such consistent business is an important source of income.

Profits soared again in 2007, coinciding with the bloodiest year of the Iraq war – and one which saw the largest US troop deployment. Its chairman at the time said:

The events of 9/11 were a watershed for the aviation industry…since then our sales have tripled and our profitability has quadrupled. We now expect a period of consolidation… which we believe will present longer term opportunities to develop new business and new markets.

It seems likely that those “new markets” may have included deportation work, given that the first UK charter deportations were introduced by the New Labour government in 2001, the same year as the invasion of Afghanistan.

Another financial highlight for the company was the 2011 Arab Spring, which contributed to a 93% increase in pre-tax profits. Air Partner had earlier won a four-year contract with the Department for International Development (DfID) to become its “sole provider of passenger and freight air charter services”, and had been hired to be a charter broker to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Crisis Centre.

As people in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia took to the streets against their dictators, the company carried out emergency evacuations, including for “some of the largest oil companies”. A year later, it described a “new revenue stream from the oil & gas industry”, perhaps a bonus product of the evacuation work.

Finally, its largest jump in profits was seen in 2021, as it reaped the benefits of converging crises: the pandemic, the evacuation of Afghanistan, and the supply chain crisis caused by Brexit and the severe congestion of global sea-shipping routes. The company was tasked with repatriation flights, PPE shipments, and “flying agricultural workers into the UK from elsewhere in Europe”, as well as responding to increased demand for “corporate shuttles” in the UK and US.¹⁰ Pre-tax profits soared 833% to £8.4 million. It made a gross profit of approximately £45 million in both 2021 and 2022. The company fared so well in fact from the pandemic that one paper summed it up with an article entitled “Air Partner takes off after virus grounds big airlines”.

While there is scant reporting on the company’s involvement in deportations, The Times recently mentioned that Air Partner “helps in the deporting of individuals to Africa and the Caribbean, a business that hasn’t slowed down during the pandemic”. In a rare direct reference to deportation work, CEO Mark Briffa responded that it:

…gives Wheels Up [Air Partner’s parent company] a great opportunity to expand beyond private jets…It was always going to be a challenge for a company our size to scale up and motor on beyond where we are.

Yet Briffa’s justification based on the apparent need to diversify beyond VIP flights looks particularly hollow against the evidence of decades of lucrative government work his company has enjoyed.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson from the company’s PR firm TB Cardew said:

As a policy, we do not comment on who we fly or where we fly them. Customer privacy, safety and security are paramount for Air Partner in all of our operations. We do not confirm, deny or comment on any potential customer, destination or itinerary.

The parent company: Wheels Up

Kenny Dichter, Wheels Up CEO

Air Partner was bought in spring 2022 for $108.2 million by Wheels Up Experience Inc, a US charter airline which was recently listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company calls itself one of the world’s largest private aviation companies, with over 180 owned or long-term leased aircraft, 150 managed fleet (a sort of sharing arrangement with owners), and 1,200 aircraft which it can hire for customers when needed.

In contrast to Air Partner, its new owner is in deep trouble. While Wheels Up’s revenues have increased considerably over the past few years (from $384 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion in 2022), these were far outweighed by its costs. It made a net loss in 2021 of $190 million, more than double that of the previous year. The company attributes this to the ongoing impact of Covid-19, with reduced crew availability and customer cancellations. And the situation shows no sign of abating, with a loss of $276.5 million in the first nine months of this year alone. Wheels Up is responding with “aggressive cost-cutting”, including some redundancies.

Wheels Up is, in turn, 20% owned by Delta Airlines, one of the world’s oldest and largest airlines. Mammoth asset manager Fidelity holds an 8% share, while Wheels Up’s CEO Kenneth Dichter owns 5%. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘Big Three’ asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street each hold smaller shareholdings.

Among its clients, Wheels Up counts various celebrities – some of whom have entered into arrangements to promote the company as ‘brand ambassadors’. These apparently include Jennifer Lopez, American football players Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, J.J. Watt, Joey Logano, and Serena Williams.

Given Wheels Up’s current financial situation, it can be safely assumed that government contracts will not be easily abandoned, particularly in a time of instability in the industry as a whole. At the same time, in view of the importance of Wheels Up’s brand and its VIP clientele, anything that poses a risk to its reputation would need to be handled delicately by the company.

It also remains to be seen whether Wheels Up will use its own fleet to fulfil Air Partner’s contracting work, and potentially become a supplier of deportation planes in its own right.

Top people

Mark Briffa, Air Partner CEO and Wheels Up president

Air Partner has been managed by CEO Mark Briffa since 2010. A former milkman and son of Maltese migrants, Briffa grew up in an East Sussex council house and left school with no O or A levels. He soon became a baggage handler at Gatwick airport, eventually making his way into sales and up the ladder to management roles. Briffa is also president of the parent company, Wheels Up.

Ed Warner OBE is the company’s chair, which means he leads on its strategy and manages the board of directors. An Oxbridge-educated banker and former chair of UK Athletics, Warner no doubt helps Air Partner maintain its connections in the world of sport. He sits on the board of private equity fund manager HarbourVest, and has previously been chairman of BlackRock Energy and Resources Income Trust, which invests in mining and energy.

Kenny Dichter is founder and CEO of Air Partner’s US parent company, Wheels Up. Dichter is an entrepreneur who has founded or provided early investment to a list of somewhat random companies, from a chain of ‘wellness’ stores, to a brand of Tequila.

Tony Mack was chairman of the business founded by his parents for 23 years and a major shareholder, before retiring from Air Partner in 2014. Nowadays he prefers to spend his time on the water, where he indulges in yacht racing.

Some of Air Partner’s previous directors are particularly well-connected. Richard Everitt, CBE held the company chairmanship from 2012 until 2017. A solicitor by training, prior to joining Air Partner Everitt was a director of the British Aviation Authority (BAA) and chief executive of National Air Traffic Services (Nats), and then CEO of the Port of London Authority (PLA). Since leaving the PLA, he has continued his career on the board of major transport authorities, having twice been appointed by the Department of Transport as chair of Dover Harbour Board, a two-day per week job with an annual salary of £79,500. He also served as a commissioner of Belfast Harbour.

One figure with friends in high places was the Hon. Rowland John Fromanteel Cobbold, who was an Air Partner director from 1996 to 2004. Cobbold was the son of 1st Baron Cobbold, former Governor of the Bank of England and former Lord Chamberlain, an important officer of the royal household. He was also grandson of Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton and governor of Bengal, and younger brother of 2nd Baron Cobbold, who was a crossbench peer.

Lib Dem peer Lord Lee of Trafford held significant shares in Air Partner from at least 2007 until the company was bought by Wheels Up in 2022. Lord Lee served as parliamentary undersecretary for MOD Procurement under Margaret Thatcher, as well as Minister for Tourism. In 2015 the value of his 113,500 shares totalled £446,000. His shares in the company were despite having been Lib Dem party spokesman on defence at the time. Seemingly, having large stakes in a business which benefits from major MOD contracts, whilst simultaneously advocating on defence policy was not deemed a serious conflict of interest. The former stockbroker is now a regular columnist for the Financial Times. Calling himself the “first ISA millionaire”, Lee published a book called “How to Make a Million – Slowly: Guiding Principles From a Lifetime Investing”.

Lord Lee of Trafford

The company’s recent profits have been healthy enough to ensure that those at the top are thoroughly buffered from the current cost of living crisis, as all executive and non-executive directors received a hefty pay rise. Its 2022 Annual Report reveals that CEO Mark Briffa’s pay package totalled £808,000 (£164,000 more than he received in 2021) and outgoing Chief Financial Officer Joanne Estell received £438,000 (compared with £369,000 in 2021), not to mention that Briffa and Estell were awarded a package in spring 2021 of 100% and 75% of their salary in shares. Given the surge in Air Partner’s share price just before the buyout, it’s likely that the net worth of its directors – and investors like Lord Lee – has significantly increased too.

Conclusion

What really is the difference between the people smugglers vilified daily by right-wing rags, and deportation merchants like Air Partner? True, Air Partner helps cast humans away in the opposite direction, often to places of danger rather than potential safety. And true, smugglers’ journeys are generally more consensual, with migrants themselves often hiring their fixers. But for a huge fee, people smugglers and deportation profiteers alike ignore the risks and indignities involved, as human cargo is shunted around in the perverse market of immigration controls.

In October 2022, deportation airline Privilege Style announced it would pull out of the Rwanda deal following strategic campaigning by groups including Freedom from Torture and SOAS Detainee Support. This is an important development and we can learn lessons from the direct action tactics used. Yet campaigns against airlines are continuously being undermined by Air Partner – who, as the Home Office’s deportation fixer, will simply seek others to step in.

And under the flashing blue lights of a police state, news that an airline will merely be deporting refugees to their countries of origin – however dangerous – rather than to a distant African processing base, might be seen as wonderful news. It isn’t. Instead of becoming accustomed to a dystopian reality, let’s be spurred on by the campaign’s success to put an end to this cruel industry in its entirety.

Appendix: Air Partner Offices

Air Partner’s headquarters can be found next to Gatwick Airport, 15 minutes walk from Brook House and Tinsley House detention centres

2 City Place, Air Partner’s HQ

Air Partner’s addresses, according to its most recent annual report, are as follows:

• UK: 2 City Place, Beehive Ring Road, Gatwick, West Sussex RH6 0PA.
• France: 89/91 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris & 27 Boulevard Saint-Martin, 75003 Paris.
• Germany: Im Mediapark 5b, 50670 Köln.
• Italy: Via Valtellina 67, 20159 Milano.
• Turkey: Halil Rıfatpaşa Mh Yüzer Havuz Sk No.1 Perpa Ticaret Merkezi ABlok Kat.12 No.1773, Istanbul.

With thanks to Abolish Frontex and Deportation Alarm for their insights.

Footnotes

The post Air Partner: the Home Office’s little-known deportation fixer appeared first on Corporate Watch.

A Corporate Watch investigation revealed Choose Love’s relationship with an organisation called Prism the Gift Fund. Prism runs “collective funds” for charities like Choose Love and takes 2% of their income for doing so. Prism also manages donation funds for rich people, who want to give to charity without the trouble of setting up their own private foundations (while still maintaining the “tax benefits” from charitable giving, naturally).

The last available financial report (2020) showed Choose Love raised £11.8 million and spent £9.7 million. Just over £1 million went on programmes in France, with more than £5 million in Greece, £1 million in the UK, £617,000 in Syria, and smaller amounts in another 13 locations around the world.

A year later concerns about the charity highlighted in our investigation haven’t gone away. Former Choose Love employees recently contacted us with this open letter documenting their experiences.

Dear Choose Love

None of us feel safe signing this letter, and we ask you to respect our anonymity. Whether it’s our references ruined, projects we are associated with no longer receiving funding, or your readiness to involve aggressive lawyers. Some ex-staff felt too fearful to be involved, even anonymously, as they feel they’ve been gagged. But believe us when we say that the feeling of disappointment and sadness about your lack of love is shared by large numbers of people.

For the good of the organisation, and most critically, for the good of the people it exists to serve, real change must start with the leadership team.

Now is the time for genuine, meaningful change at Choose Love – and we mean more than just opaque independent reviews with outcomes no staff are allowed to see (this has happened twice already).

We want to see a commitment to proper accountability and transparency in all aspects of the organisation, support for the team to unionise – and a genuine apology for everyone who has been ground down, burnt out and treated as disposable. It’s the absolute minimum we should expect, and yet we still don’t actually expect to see it. We hope we’re wrong.

With a new, kinder, more experienced leadership team, it is time the organisation truly earned its name.

Signed,
12 former Choose Love team members.

IF YOU WANT TO SEND MONEY TO NORTHERN FRANCE:

Image by @LouisWitter via @calaisolidarity

Calais Migrant Solidarity / Watch the Channel:

The Calais Migrant Solidarity network has been active in Calais since 2009, practising solidarity not charity. Watch the Channel shares sea safety information and monitors the UK and French authorities “to ensure that the coastguards fulfil their duties under international maritime law to rescue people in distress.” It doesn’t have its own bank account but donations can be sent via CMS.

www.calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/donate

Calais Appeal:

Calais Appeal is a group of eight humanitarian aid organisations working in Calais: Calais Food Collective, Collective Aid, Human Rights Observers, Refugee Community Kitchen, Refugee Women’s Centre, Refugee Info Bus, Woodyard and Project Play. They set up this joint emergency appeal fund after having their funding cut by Choose Love, they still need support for their ongoing work.

www.calaisappeal.co.uk

 

The post Choose Truth: former Choose Love employees speak out appeared first on Corporate Watch.

This article looking at the charity Migrant Help, is the first in a series of reports examining the corporate interests behind organisations working with refugees and people seeking asylum. We interviewed people working with refugees who had frequent contact with the organisation. We found that:

• Migrant Help has a multi-million pound contract with the Home Office to provide a phone line for people seeking asylum. The service is the primary route for people seeking asylum to gain information or support for all their needs.
• The phone line has been plagued with problems since at least 2015, with callers enduring long waiting times or unanswered calls.
• In fact, it’s struggling so much that it is now subcontracting this phone service out.
• As middlemen between people seeking asylum and the Home Office, asylum accommodation providers or other agencies, it is frequently unclear where the responsibility for problems lands.

‘Migrant (No) Help’

The Migrant Help website gives the impression that they care for and support “people affected by displacement and exploitation”. A prominent donate button navigates you easily to give money to “change someone’s life”. But this refugee charity is not all it seems. As a person working on the front line with refugees told Corporate Watch:

Migrant Help are the ‘bouncers’ of the opaque and Kafka-esque asylum support system. They have a friendly veneer but there are enormous issues with accessibility and delivering on the contract. Phones are not answered. Contact emails are frequently changed at short notice. Escalated emails are not acknowledged.

Migrant Help, formerly Migrant Helpline, is one of the Home Office’s key contractors and the sole official provider of advice and support for people seeking asylum. It is both a charity and a company. It claims to be able to offer telephone advice and support to people seeking asylum on basically any issue. These include navigating the asylum process; applying for asylum support and accommodation; finding a lawyer; accessing healthcare; problems with asylum accommodation (it claims it will liaise with accommodation providers to address issues); welfare issues such as neglect or domestic violence; and asylum benefits payments problems.

People seeking asylum have little choice but to use the Migrant Help phone line because it’s provided through Home Office funding. As some working on the front line explained, the Migrant Help phone service is the only option most people seeking asylum have to ask for help or to report issues, and this creates huge problems.

A one-stop shop might sound like an efficient way to run things. But that approach only works when the service is of the highest quality. If that provider is at the centre of countless stories of unprofessional service, failure to fulfil its duties and abandoning people in its care, the situation becomes disastrous, with a population seeking asylum forced into near dependency on a phone line that so often fails to get answered.

Migrant Help isn’t struggling for money. In 2021, the charity’s total income was over £22 million; £20.46 million of this came from four “government contracts”. These aren’t just any government contracts. They’re all directly from the Home Office. The very same department that hasn’t let up on making life as difficult as possible for refugees and people seeking asylum. It is perhaps no coincidence then that despite receiving millions in Home Office funding, Migrant Help has so often failed to deliver and has consistently let down the vulnerable people it is directly funded to help.

Money, money, money

A look at previous accounts shows that Migrant Help’s income has been steadily increasing since 2017 when it received just over £8 million from government contracts and grants. The contracts increased year on year to £15.12 million by 2020 with another huge leap in 2021.

The charity has received “significant” Home Office funding since 1994. By 2019, it secured a £100 million contract to run the Home Office system called “Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility (AIRE)” services, and act as the official point of contact for refugees to get advice on their asylum claims. This was part of a £4 billion award for Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts (AASC) working alongside Mears, Clearsprings and Serco which were tasked with providing asylum seeker accommodation in the UK. By 2021, the Migrant Help contract rose to £235 million, perhaps because the initial four-year contract appears to have been extended to ten; it will end in 2029. This contract pays well for some at the charity. At least one person earns between £120,000 – £130,000 and two people earn £70,000 to £80,000. Meanwhile, the Home Office allocates people seeking asylum £40.85 per week.

Migrant Help financial history graph sourced from Charity Commission.

The AIRE advice contract also involves advising refugees on what to do if their claims are refused. That specifically includes telling them about “the support available to return to their country of origin.” The Home Office has long had a strategy of pushing people to leave through so-called “voluntary” return, and saw Migrant Help as playing an important role in meeting its “removal” targets.

The multi-million-pound contract might suggest that Migrant Help was providing an effective service for the Home Office and actively helping refugees and people seeking asylum. Yet, evidence shows this just isn’t true. Complaints go back to 2015 when Migrant Help was “slammed for leaving refugees destitute”. And it hasn’t stopped.

“Gatekeepers and the face of the hostile environment”

Photo by Ahmed Nishaath on Unsplash

We’re now used to pretty much every service we use having a phone helpline. And we’ve all been there, waiting on the phone for hours while we try to speak to our bank or ‘service provider’. But imagine you’re new to the country, and that ‘service provider’ is responsible for dealing with all major problems: your health, your housing, your money. And imagine how it must feel when that phone line takes hours to answer, or the person who finally picks it up can’t or won’t help resolve your issue. That’s the situation people are forced into because the Migrant Help phone line is their only point of access.

The head of operations with a front-line refugee support charity told Corporate Watch that Migrant Help “are the gatekeepers and the face of the hostile environment. It is a well-known joke that their name should be Migrant no Help”.

And that’s not surprising, because from the quality of the service provided to logged cases of financial precarity and even destitution, the catalogue of evidence against Migrant Help’s ‘support’ is damning:

• In 2017, the Red Cross criticised Migrant Help claiming that since it took on the role of giving Home Office advice to refugees, the situation became “untenable”, with more people being left destitute. In particular, it challenged the decision to replace face-to-face meetings with telephone support.
• A 2020 report from Institute of Race Relations called the AIRE contract “a disaster” and criticised both Migrant Help and housing group Mears. An open letter from over 100 charities ‘warned that the new repairs reporting and advice system was causing “needless suffering among those it is meant to protect”’.
• A 2021 report from the All-Party Immigration Detention Group detailed problems with the Migrant Help phone service endured by refugees in the notorious Penally and Napier detention centres.
• In 2021, problems getting through to the Migrant Help phone line contributed to thousands of refugees being left without access to food or money. The Home office gives people seeking asylum £40.85 per week on Aspen cash cards, but the system totally broke down, with cards not arriving or failing to work. Yet again, the only ‘help’ available was via the Migrant Help phone line. People seeking asylum don’t have access to bank accounts, aren’t allowed to work and rarely have networks of family or friends able to lend cash, so days of delays where Migrant Help doesn’t answer phone calls cause acute hardship and hunger.
• People seeking asylum have been unable to report issues with inadequate housing to Migrant Help. According to the BBC, the Home Office refused to answer Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from refugee charities “about the severity and frequency of complaints, and about how Migrant Help was performing”.
• One successful FOI request revealed that between Sept 2019 to Sept 2021 there were 517 logged complaints against Migrant Help.
• In April 2022 a Home Office report (released through an FoI) implicated Mears, Migrant Help and the Home Office in a crisis for Badreddin Abdalla Adam that ultimately led to him stabbing six people. He’d tried to make contact with Migrant Help for support with his health and accommodation 72 times in the period leading up to the stabbings.

Evidence shared with Corporate Watch echoes these issues are ongoing. Our contact told us that a caseworker asked if Migrant Help could issue a “hardship payment” to someone who’d had no money for several months: “I’ve escalated to Migrant Help and they say it is being investigated. But when I ask, there is no time frame for an answer.”

“People are sick of complaining,’ one hotel resident in the asylum process reportedly said, “because they feel it makes no difference. And you have to complain to Migrant Help”. Someone working with urgent asylum cases reported waiting four hours on the phone before eventually being told by Migrant Help that the issue needed to “’be escalated’, and so they just put me on hold again for another hour”. Meanwhile, a volunteer reported trying to support someone who was homeless and had already waited three days to get into accommodation but reportedly:

When he called Migrant help they had him on hold for 45 mins and then it cut off. His battery went dead and he had to find somewhere to charge his phone and try again to be told there was no update.

Many people seeking asylum don’t have the support of organisations that can escalate things on their behalf. Our contact also explained:

As the unique route to navigate to asylum support, to prevent destitution, people seeking asylum have literally no choice. Even organisations with specialist advisors working in this area still have to go through Migrant Help. Behind the Migrant Help contract, there are the accommodation providers… They then subcontract to security firms, but there is very little accountability. Supposedly people with complex needs such as those with mental illness, survivors of trafficking or with disabilities are given outreach support but this rarely or ever happens in my experience. Partly because trust in the organisation is so low.

The source also explained that in theory, “voluntary sector groups can apply to be commissioned and claim back money for work they do that Migrant Help should deliver”. However, “partly due to reputational risk of not wanting to be associated with Migrant Help” groups are said to frequently deliver the work themselves. But that work is difficult to fund, since the Home Office’s funding to Migrant Help is expected to cover it. This produces “over-stretched charities relying on volunteers, grassroots groups and communities to mitigate the worst impact” of Home Office failures to support people seeking asylum.

Not only is Migrant Help’s near monopoly just not working, but the organisation itself now seems to be subcontracting its duties to run the phone line, in a 3-year tender worth £1.5 million.

A dangerous blame game

The nature of the relationship between the Home Office, Migrant Help and other outsourcing giants such as Mears, Clearsprings and Serco creates additional layers of hardship both for people seeking asylum and those working at a grassroots level to provide support because accountability becomes nearly impossible. Our source told Corporate Watch:

When things don’t happen – such as people not getting the £8 per week cash support they are entitled to when living in hotels for six months; or repairs to houses that are unsafe for disabled children – it’s unclear whether fault lies with Migrant Help, the accommodation provider, the subcontractor, or the Home Office themselves. They all hide behind and blame each other and no one takes responsibility.

Given the litany of complaints against Migrant Help, it’s difficult to comprehend quite how it secured such a huge contract. Since being awarded the multi-million-pound deal, it has still failed to deliver. In fact, a 2020 investigation from the National Audit Office prompted a parliamentary report which scrutinised the Home Office AIRE contract allocation and Migrant Help’s performance.

The parliamentary report summarised that:

• The Home Office admitted faults in issuing AIRE contracts, including that the process was rushed.
• Home Office data showed that on average, calls for support historically took between 12 and 17 minutes. Yet the winning Migrant Help bid was based on a far shorter call length of four minutes on average. When it took up the contract, it was perhaps inevitably then only able to answer a fraction of the calls received between September 2019 and January 2020 (one-fifth, to be precise). The report also notes that the charity Asylum Matters sent written evidence stating “that many asylum seekers and their caseworkers had lost confidence in AIRE and simply stopped calling”.
• There was a lack of scrutiny for very large tenders issued by the Home Office, coupled with a lack of transparency.

The report also criticised the Home Office for issuing many of the AIRE contracts to the sole bidder.

According to the NAO report, Migrant Help promised that it had recruited more people and that the service had improved. The report claimed that in 2020, the charity ”answered 94% of calls within 60 seconds. However, callers are still facing long delays in being transferred to a specialist adviser when required”. And as ongoing media accounts and information given to Corporate Watch reveal, there are still huge problems for people trying to access support.

In safe hands?

Migrant Help’s 2021 trustee report claims that Migrant Help “assisted clients in reporting any issues with the accommodation”. Yet the previous year, Helen Bransfield, Migrant Help director of asylum services, offered little challenge when news broke about the appalling conditions for asylum seekers housed in the near-derelict Napier army barracks in Kent. This doesn’t quite tally with the horrific reports about conditions at Napier reported by refugees and local volunteers. Migrant Help wasn’t responsible for providing this sub-standard accommodation. However, it’s not clear whether the accommodation providers – Mears and Clearsprings – failed to act on the complaints; or whether Migrant Help failed to report them – or both. But there’s no doubt that the lack of transparency hinders accountability, leaving many people seeking asylum in a dire situation.

Meanwhile, Migrant Help’s near monopoly on asylum advice has severe implications for the quality of service. Put simply, there is little motivation to do a good job, particularly when the government’s policy is to make life as difficult as possible for refugees. The trustee report also notes that Migrant Help was “concerned about the reputational damage” and “considerable negative press coverage” about conditions at Penally and Napier. Yet It makes no mention of the people forced to live there. Migrant Help reported two other “serious incidents” to the charity commission in 2021-2021.

There also seems to be a revolving door linking some in the Migrant Help management team with other Home Office AASC providers. Juliet Halstead, Migrant Help’s deputy director of asylum services, spent a year working for Mears. She’s listed as head of housing for G4S under the Home Office Compass contract (which predates AIRE) between 2012 and 2019. G4S is the notorious security firm which ran multiple UK detention centres and supplied guards to carry out deportations; its history is embroiled in violence against migrants. Halstead joined the company at a time when it was facing intense scrutiny following the 2010 death of deportee Jimmy Mubenga. And while she worked there, G4S guards were secretly filmed throttling detainees at Brook House detention centre. Halstead was also at G4S when it subcontracted Jomast (run by Stuart Monk) to provide asylum seeker housing. During this time, Jomast painted the doors of refugee houses red which led to ongoing racist attacks. At the time, G4S “repeatedly denied” being aware of any complaints about this until the story broke in the national media.

Meanwhile, Andrew Billany, a former CEO of Migrant Help is now a trustee and director for criminal justice charity Nacro. Nacro was previously linked to G4S when it entered a bid to build and help run two prisons in Merseyside.

Systemic Failure

Migrant Help seems inextricably linked to the failures of the accommodation providers who share in this £4 billion deal. It’s impossible for asylum seekers and refugees, or those working on the front line to support them, to access any real help without going through this charity. From leaving vulnerable people waiting hours to even hear a voice at the end of a phone, to actively propping up the hostile environment by pushing voluntary return, Migrant Help is simply a cog in the ongoing racist cruelty against refugees.

If you want to help people seeking asylum, please avoid the Migrant Help ‘donate’ button. Instead of giving to Migrant Help, support grassroots initiatives providing direct support such as:

• Right to Remain provides multilingual information to empower people seeking asylum.
• Local groups around the UK such as Manchester Refugee Support Network or Bristol Refugee Rights which offer direct support for people going through the asylum system.
• Asylum Matters working locally and nationally to improve the lives of refugees and people seeking asylum through social and political change.
• Refugee Community Kitchen which provides meals for displaced people in the UK and France.

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Correction:

This article was corrected on 16 August. We incorrectly stated that Jimmy Mubenga’s death occurred during Juliet Halstead’s tenure at G4S. We have since been made aware that Halstead joined G4S two years after the death of Jimmy Mubenga and was not working there when it occurred. We have amended the article to clarify this.

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Based on Freedom of Information Act requests by Patrice Petit and flight data records, we’ve identified the airlines profiting from these mass deportations, and aim to provide context and analysis. For the full list of flights and destinations, see Annex 1 at the end of this article.

The deportees

Overall, as in previous years, Albania topped the list of the thirteen destination countries for mass deportation flights, with 497 deportees in 2021 – more than one third of the overall total. It is likely that the Home Office will continue prioritising Albanians for deportation in the year to come, given the cooperation it receives from the Albanian government. In July, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Albanian Interior Minister Bledar Çuçi signed a bilateral agreement detailing how Albanian convicts may be deported to serve out their sentence in their country of origin. In return, the Interior Minister reportedly asked Patel to “review once again the treatment regime of Albanian citizens living and working in Great Britain, in order to facilitate them in relation to new employment opportunities or seasonal movements”.

More than half (722) of all the people deported last year were sent to EU states, with Romania, Poland and Lithuania being the most frequent destinations. Brexit may have crippled the Home Office’s ability to deport asylum seekers, but it laid the legal foundation for the mass deportation of EU citizens in 2021. The Parole Board’s guidance before Brexit stated that European nationals could be expelled after a year’s prison sentence ‘although the threshold for this is higher’ than for non-Europeans; a distinction that no longer applies.

The end of 2020 saw the concerted use of charter flights to return asylum seekers who had arrived in the UK by dinghy. After the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December of that year, the UK fell out of its legal agreements with the European Union, including the Dublin Regulation. Having failed to negotiate a replacement agreement, in 2021 the Home Office was left without a legal way to deport most asylum seekers to EU. Instead, the emphasis of the charter flight programme shifted largely to deporting so-called Foreign National Offenders (FNOs).

Before looking at the numbers, we must understand who these ‘FNOs’ actually are. Home Office communications always play up deportees’ criminal records and emphasise the people on the flights with violent pasts to paint everyone with the same brush. However, speaking with detainee support groups who actually meet these people gives another picture.

Most deportees have committed relatively minor offences which are often connected to trying to survive life in the UK without documents or access to social services. These include selling drugs, sleeping rough, working without legal permission, or driving without insurance or a valid licence. If sentenced to twelve months or more, foreign nationals can be automatically deported at the end of their term. The fact that many have spent most – and in some cases all – of their adult lives in the UK, and have already been sentenced by the criminal injustice system, does not stop the Home Office tacking on deportation as an added punishment in order to appear ‘tough’ on crime and immigration. A detention visitor group told us that the vast majority of people they met who were scheduled for mass deportation last year had been designated to programmes such as the Early Removal Scheme or the Facilitated Returns Scheme, which are aimed at deporting prisoners before the end of their sentence.

Beyond the regular Albania and EU flights, deportation planes also flew to Ghana & Nigeria (1x) Jamaica (2x), Vietnam (2x), and Zimbabwe (2x), carrying a total of 86 people. These flights, especially those to Jamaica, were hotly contested by lawyers and campaigners, and mostly left with just a fraction of their intended capacity.

2021 saw the first mass deportation flights from the UK to Vietnam. This is despite the fact that many deportees were identified as potential victims of trafficking who may not have been appropriately screened by the Home Office.

Deportation planes were also scheduled to fly to Pakistan and India, but these flights were cancelled. In the case of the Pakistan flight, this was reportedly due to the Pakistani Government’s refusal to accept deportees from the UK while Pakistan remained on the UK’s red list for COVID-19 travel restrictions.

The companies

Seven airlines supplied the Home Office with charter deportation planes in 2021. AirTanker, Privilege Style, Titan, and TUI were regular collaborators, while other companies (e.g. HiFly, Wamos, and Iberojet – formerly, Evelop) were one-off providers. Corporate Watch has profiled a number of these big deportation profiteers, and revealed their involvement in last summer’s Afghan refugee evacuation airlift, showing how flexible their values are when there is money to be made.

This year provided us with a good lesson in the power, but also limitations, of public campaigns against deportation profiteers. Since late 2020, tourism giant TUI had been making up its pandemic-inflicted shortfall through enthusiastically deporting for profit. However, it apparently ended its role in the UK deportation machine in August following a sustained campaign that culminated in a day of nationwide actions in front of its holiday stores. Exposing these companies, and the pain and misery their actions inflict on people’s lives, can be an effective way to get them to stop, especially for commercial airlines like TUI (or previously Virgin Atlantic) who rely on ordinary holidaymakers to fill their seats and bank accounts.

Yet the fact that tiny Spanish charter airline Privilege Style immediately stepped in to fill TUI’s shoes shows that public shaming has its limits when confronting airlines that can afford to, in fact are rewarded for, ignoring the public’s opinion of their actions. This is also illustrated by the fact that those deportation planes bound for Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe which received the most resistance, including direct action blockades, were flown by small companies (Iberojet, HiFly Wamos, and Privilege Style) specialising in bespoke services for high-paying clients. For instance, image-conscious HiFly stopped running deportation flights from the UK after Corporate Watch exposed its role in the practice in 2020. Yet its deportation of Zimbabweans last July shows that such companies will continue profiteering whenever they think they can get away with it. Finally, by being headquartered on the Iberian peninsula, these companies have been insulated from the reputational blow back. This may explain why UK-based Titan and AirTanker have tended to limit themselves to the routine deportation of EU and Albanian nationals to their ‘home countries’, a practice which failed to reach newspaper headlines.

The cost

The Home Office’s deportation charter flights programme has been steadily growing over the last few years, up from 35 flights in 2016. In turn, so has its cost to the public. The Home Office spent over £11.7m on charter deportation flights in 2021, with the average flight costing over £180,000. This is a marked increase from the almost £8.2m reportedly spent on 47 flights in 2020. The figures above do not include any costs that may be charged retrospectively, nor does it include the costs of the guards who keep deportees quiet and in their seats, often inflicting pain to do so.

The average per-person cost was nearly £9000, around 10% lower than last year’s average. This is due to the Home Office’s targeting of so-called FNOs who have fewer legal avenues to fight deportation, and who provide a larger potential ‘pool’ of deportees than Channel-crossing asylum seekers. The majority of deportation planes also flew to countries within close proximity to the UK, saving the Home Office fuel costs and air time.

Some long-haul flights – e.g. Jamaica, where deportation planes were flown on two occasions for four and then seven people, or Ghana & Nigeria to which one plane deported one and six people respectively – will have cost substantially more than the per-flight and per-person averages. In three cases (Ghana, Hungary, and Spain) legs were flown only to deport one person. An entire wide-body jet was flown to deport less than ten people no less than eight times.

As is often reported in the media, chartering a deportation plane is extraordinarily expensive. However, our criticism of this practice cannot remain at the level of financial cost, as this inadvertently justifies the Home Office’s efforts to increase their ‘value-for-money’ by deporting more people per plane. For these flights, the Home Office gathers and detains as many nationals of that country as possible, regardless of individual circumstances, on short notice. Mass expulsions strain the system of legal protections as lawyers and detainee support groups scramble to identify, locate, then represent everyone before the deadline. Large numbers of people fail to receive the complex advice and support they need before the doors close on them, particularly since access to this support is frustrated by the routine Home Office practice of moving people around between detention centres.

The year ahead

Stop TUI demonstration in Brighton last summer. Image from SOAS Detainee Support Group

All the FOI responses analysed for this report contained a section of boilerplate text which states that deportations are “often frustrated by last minute challenges submitted hours before a scheduled flight”, before promoting the Home Secretary’s new Borders and Immigration Bill as a tool to deport people more easily. Indeed, the Bill contains a number of clauses that will “accelerate” deportations and remove the rights of people facing them to contest the Home Office’s decision through the courts. We should then expect that once this bill passes (it is currently at the Report Stage in the House of Lords), and the legislation comes into force, that chartered deportation planes will become even more central to the UK border regime.

This year has shown that the government is able to organise twice-weekly deportation planes and find willing partners even when public pressure mounts against the most egregiously racist mass expulsions. Going after the private airlines and other companies profiting from these flights can be effective, but only when campaigning is sustained and collaborators actually feel their reputation or bottom-line threatened. Legal action can also be effective in cutting the numbers of people removed on charter flights, but often falls short of challenging the wider deportation charter flight machine.

With the number of deportation planes likely to continue ramping up in 2022, direct action must be taken to prevent these mass expulsions from continuing to proceed unchallenged, and becoming more normalised. Targeting the private companies that carry them out is still one of the weakest links. More than ever before, diverse groups must coalesce country wide to apply legal, reputational and direct physical pressure to ground the planes.

Annex 1: List of chartered deportation planes and destinations

To download the data as a spreadsheet, click here.

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Refugees in London are being housed by the Home Office in run-down, insect-infested hotels. Meanwhile, private housing providers are raking it in.

Corporate Watch spoke to an Iraqi Kurdish family who arrived in the UK in November 2020. Since then, the family – who wish to remain anonymous – have been put up by the Home Office in disgusting conditions in several hotels in London with their six children. They told Corporate Watch that – aside from the insect infestation – they have had to deal with the ceiling caving in; water pouring in from the apartment above them; insufficient food, a lack of electricity, and – when there has been power – dodgy and dangerous electrics.

Mother of the family Rojda (not her real name) told Corporate Watch:

“I’m a mother of six kids, our life is very hard here, and we have no rights.

When we arrived here [in 2020] we had two rooms for all of us… all of our accommodations have been very bad”

Rojda described how she often had to take the family to see another friend living in a different hotel in order to take showers because of the lack of hot water. Rojda said that it was a “shame” that despite living in a rich capital like London she didn’t even have electricity or hot water.

The adults in the family have not been given permission to work in the UK and are completely dependant on the Home Office for accommodation.

They are currently living in a hotel in just three rooms for a total of eight people. The hotel is infested with bed bugs which are causing skin irritation. They provided Corporate Watch with these shocking photos:

A baby with a skin irritation caused by bed bugs

Dead insects on a child’s cot

The family were temporarily moved to new accommodation after a housing officer intervened, but Rojda told us that within weeks they were forced to return to the bug-infested hotel.

Heartbreakingly, Rojda told us that the staff at the hotel had denied her son food, after he complained about the state of the family’s accomodation.

Rojda said that it’s not just her family who are suffering. She doesn’t have a common language to communicate with the other families at the hotel, but she can see that the conditions are just as bad for them

The Home Office’s slum landlords

Nearly 55,000 refugees are currently housed in the Home Office’s ‘contingency accommodation’ waiting to find out if their asylum claim will get approved. The UK’s asylum housing contracts have been wholly privatised since 2012.

The company that is responsible for providing the accommodation that Rojda’s family is housed in is Clearsprings Ready Homes, which reported a massive jump in profits in its last set of accounts – to £4.5m. Its surging profits have led to a seven-fold increase in dividends to the parent company. Clearsprings handles the asylum accommodation contracts for the Home Office in the south of England.

Clearsprings also runs Napier, an ex-military barracks which is being used to house refugees in Kent in conditions described as “squalid” by lawyers of the residents.

In other parts of the UK, the Home Office has awarded contracts to Serco and Mears Group. Outsourcing giant Serco reported £180m in profits in 2019, while Mears reported over half a million worth of profits from its housing business alone.

We’ve decided not to name the Central London hotel because of fears that fascists will target the residents.

“Imagine coming to school with that”

Rojda suggested that we speak to the children’s teachers so they could tell us about the effect living in these conditions has on the wellbeing of the children and their education.

The school provided a statement which says that it has had to get “more and more involved” with helping children in “temporary accommodation”, including providing support with practical things like travel and uniforms, as well as “navigating the bureaucracy”. Its statement reads:

“Living in these difficult conditions obviously impacts the children. They tell us about how overcrowded it is, how noisy, and how they have trouble sleeping.

Imagine coming to school with that. They are trying to learn a new language, integrate into a new school, adapt to a new culture when at the same time they have to deal with great uncertainty about how long they will be staying for.”

Passing the buck

The Canary contacted the Home Office about the conditions at the hotel. They passed the buck to Clearsprings, saying:

“We are dealing with unprecedented pressures on the asylum system, but despite this we continue to ensure the accommodation provided is safe, comfortable and secure.

However, we expect high standards from all of our providers, and any asylum seekers who have problems can get in touch with Migrant Help 24/7, every day of the year.”

We also contacted Clearsprings Ready Homes. A spokesperson said:

“Clearsprings Ready Homes works closely with its delivery partners to ensure that safe, habitable and correctly equipped accommodation is provided. Whenever issues are raised, or defects are identified Ready Homes will undertake a full investigation and ensure that those issues are addressed.”

The Home Office also said:

“The Nationality and Borders Bill that we are introducing will deliver the most comprehensive reform in decades to fix the broken asylum system.”

However – far from making the situation better for refugees – the Nationality and Borders Bill will make the situation even worse by introducing endless reviews of people’s asylum claims, which stretch out the asylum process. This means that people are reliant on Home Office accommodation for even longer. In general, the bill is designed to make claiming asylum in the UK even more difficult.

“Not an isolated experience”

Rojda’s family’s situation is not unique at all. The Home Office’s private contractors routinely provide dirty and dilapidated accommodation to those seeking asylum. Earlier this month, Clearsprings was forced to make improvements to flats it’s using to house refugees in Uxbridge after they “were found to be rife with damp, mould, water leaks and pest infestations”. Last year, six men won a high court legal challenge. The court ruled that their accommodation at the Napier Barracks in Kent – which is managed by Clearsprings – failed to meet a “minimum standard”.

We spoke to Maddie Harris, director of the Humans for Rights network. She said:

“The experience of this family is utterly appalling and shows a clear disregard for their health, wellbeing and rights. It is also, not an isolated experience. We have spoken to hundreds of people seeking sanctuary in the UK who are accommodated in hotels throughout England and it is clear from the testimonies shared with us that there is no attention paid to upholding even the most basic of rights. People often spend well over a year in cramped, overcrowded hotels, run by private contractors who surveil their every move.”

Medical care is limited

Harris continued:

“Medical care is often limited or restricted by staff who refuse to assist people in registering with GP surgeries. Food is nutritionally poor and small in quantity and often lacks consideration for faith, cultural or dietary requirements. Access to solicitors and legal advice is severely lacking and little to no information is provided to people. These hotels and accommodations such as Napier Barracks, are for many experienced like quasi-detention and we have heard from numerous people that their mental health is severely effected by isolation, lack of information and complete uncertainty as to the progress of their asylum claim. These accommodations are run by private companies, who profit from and are responsible for much of this harm.”

“Ultimate accountability lies with the Home Office”

Harris concluded that, although private companies are profiting from running the accommodation, the Home Office bears the final responsibility. She said:

“Ultimate accountability lies with the Home Office who are responsible for these contracts and the welfare of asylum seekers in the UK, yet there is a complete lack of oversight for how these contracts are managed, resulting in untold harm to many thousands of people seeking sanctuary in the UK.”

Solidarity

Refugees living in the Home Office’s slum accommodation can be found in many of our communities. These are people who are new to the UK, and they are bearing the brunt of a racist state which is colluding with ruthless private companies out to make a fast buck from the suffering of others. We need to be ready to stand in solidarity with people in the Home Office’s slum accommodation, and to struggle alongside them for better conditions.

Featured image via Alisdare Hickson/Wikimedia Commons (resized to 770×403 pixels), all other images used in this article were provided to Corporate Watch by Rojda’s family (with permission)

We know that Rojda’s family’s situation is just the tip of the iceberg. If you – or people you know – are in a similar situation you can talk to Corporate Watch here.

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