A ‘dysfunctional’ culture at the Home Office meant key controls were abandoned in the procurement of failed asylum sites that cost almost £100m, according to a scathing new report.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has exposed the ‘disastrously’ managed acquisition of the former HMP Northeye in East Sussex, and warned it is not confident that these failures will not be repeated.

Without commissioning a proper valuation to ascertain a fair price, the Home Office bought Northeye for £15.4m – more than double what its owners had paid the previous year.

The site needed £20m worth of building repairs and significant remediation works, and it was not clear whether it could be connected to utilities.

The Home Office planned to house 1,400 asylum seekers at Northeye. It has now concluded the site cannot be used, and plans to dispose of it. Northeye is just one of a string of failed asylum accommodation sites on which the Government spent millions, including £34m on the troubled and now abandoned Bibby Stockholm scheme; £60m on RAF Scampton, which was never used; £2.9m on the cancelled site in Linton-on-Ouse; and about £715m on the scrapped Rwanda scheme.

While the Home Office argued that it needed to work at pace and innovate, the PAC noted that ‘buying land and buildings is not inherently innovative’.

It concluded that the Government had ‘prioritised appearing to address the issue of asylum accommodation over value for money and effective implementation’.

PAC chair Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said: ‘The Home Office says it has learned the lessons from its disastrously managed acquisition of the Northeye site.

‘These are lessons for which the taxpayer has paid a steep price.’

It was revealed today that the Home Office has stopped a key funding stream worth millions of pounds to councils receiving unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.