Recommendation 4

The Home Office was warned repeatedly that it needed to ensure it had adequate commercial and contract management capacity, but did not learn this lesson. Failure to do so left it unprepared to respond to the surge in demand for asylum accommodation. The department’s failure to recognise early on that the rapidly expanding value and complexity of the contracts would require additional resource and active management is unacceptable. We welcome the Home Office’s more recent capacity building and improvements to contract management, but this has come much too late. Given the department’s propensity for reprioritising staff and resources, we are also concerned that effective contract management may be deprioritised over time, risking similar failings as and when the next crisis arises. (Conclusion, Paragraph 43)