EXCLUSIVE Revealed: The Essex businessman pocketing £25million a year to house migrants across England and Wales after winning exclusive Home Office contracts
- Essex tycoon Graham King, 56, is being paid £25million a year to house migrants
- Former disco boss is collecting more of Britain’s foreign aid budget than Ghana
A former small-time Essex businessman is pocketing £25million a year to house migrants – taking home more of Britain’s foreign aid budget than Ghana.
Graham King, 56, ran a caravan park, a taxi firm and a teenage disco a quarter of a century ago, but has since won Home Office contracts to provide accommodation for ever-growing numbers of refugees.
His company, Clearsprings Ready Homes, holds the exclusive contracts to house asylum seekers across southern England and Wales.
Its annual takings from the Home Office, funded from the foreign aid budget, rocketed to an astonishing £500million in 2021.
Mr King’s personal share of the pre-tax profits then was well over £25million, meaning he got more of Britain’s international aid than struggling former colony Ghana, which has a population of 32million.
Graham King, 56, ran a caravan park, a taxi firm and a teenage disco a quarter of a century ago, but has since won Home Office contracts to provide accommodation for ever-growing numbers of refugees
Mr King’s company, Clearsprings Ready Homes, holds the exclusive contracts to house asylum seekers across southern England and Wales
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Migrants have complained about standards in his hotels, people living nearby have campaigned against their new neighbours, and taxpayers are angered by the rising cost.
But asylum tycoon Mr King not only enjoys luxury holidays all over the world but has put his son and daughter through a £44,000-a-year boarding school and bought a listed mansion in rural Essex.
Family social media posts reference trips to India, Barbados, Costa Rica, the French Riviera, skiing in the Alps, Berlin, Paris, and Majorca – to name but a selection in the past few years.
Meanwhile, Mr King is also funding his daughter’s bid to become an artist. Her artworks feature test tubes full of her own urine and £10 prints bearing the slogan ‘Will trade racists for refugees’, with half the proceeds going to Amnesty International.
His daughter, 22, an art student at Reading University, has declared: ‘War, violence and persecution have forced millions of families to seek a safer place to live. When they arrive to safer ground, they’re often met with hostility.’
She does not note that thousands of those same refugees are also helping to keep her father, to whom she affectionately refers as ‘u legend’, in business.
Graham King ‘s daughter Catalina 22, an art student at Reading university
Catalina, an art student at reading University, has spoken out to defend refugees, posting on Instagram that many are fleeing war and oppression
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Accountants working for Mr King’s company predict income will stay booming for years, with the Home Office contract running till 2029 and no sign of migrant numbers dropping.
Indeed, last year Home Office spending on housing asylum seekers almost quadrupled, to £3.7billion, meaning Mr King could have made £100million.
Today the Daily Mail pictures the migrant tycoon for the first time and tells how he rose to become the asylum hotel King.
In the 1990s, he and his brother Jeff were setting out in business on their own after helping their father Jack run his holiday chalets business empire based on Canvey Island in Essex.
The King brothers jointly owned the Kings Holiday Camp and Thorney Bay caravan park, plus Steve’s Radio Cars on Canvey Island.
In 1999 they made an abortive bid to run an under-18s disco in the Coliseum cinema in Leigh, Essex, before complaints of teenagers vandalising cars, and vomiting in the streets led to Southend council withdrawing its entertainments licence.
Then, as the new millennium dawned, the King brothers started winning Government contracts.
Mr King (pictured with daughter Catalina) started running small businesses in Essex and is now a tycoon, handling a Home Office contract to house migrants worth £25million a year
Mr King is also funding his daughter’s bid to become an artist. Her artworks feature test tubes full of her own urine and £10 prints bearing the slogan ‘Will trade racists for refugees’, with half the proceeds going to Amnesty International
Accountants working for Mr King’s company predict income will stay booming for years, with the Home Office contract running till 2029 and no sign of migrant numbers dropping
In 1999 Tony Blair’s Labour Government began dispersing asylum seekers round Britain and outsourcing accommodation to private firms.
Clearsprings got its first migrant contracts in 2000 – and within months Lord Greaves had told parliament that Clearsprings was among firms ‘profiteering’ from asylum seekers.
Mr King – who bought out his brother Jeff from the asylum business three years ago – last year sold shares back to his own company for £70million.
And according to his accountants, money will keep pouring into the coffers of Clearsprings, with Mr King still owning 94 per cent of the shares.
Accounts note that in the year to January 2022, income from the Home Office trebled to £500million – and before tax profit rocketed by 1,000 per cent to £27.3million, with more than £50million in the bank.
The accountants say: ‘The Home Office contracts run until September 2029. Demand for accommodation for asylum seekers has remained high throughout the year.
‘This has been driven by an ever-increasing influx of asylum applicants to the UK due to high levels of political and economic turmoil in many countries.
‘The number of arrivals per year is expected to continue at a high level for the foreseeable future.’
As a result, Mr King’s massive profits are almost certain to keep growing, regardless of a long series of controversies over the migrant accommodation provided.
They include claims his firm is depleting the rental market by bidding over the odds to secure properties, changing the character of towns and villages by suddenly introducing huge volumes of refugees, and depriving communities of much-loved hotels – which can also slash income from tourists with nowhere to go.
Migrants have complained too, with claims that inadequate action was taken against outbreaks of scabies.
There have been complaints of inadequate heating and water after a fire broke out, of migrants having to wear ‘stigmatising’ wrist bands to collect food, of rats, and of poor quality food and broken electrical sockets.
Regardless of the controversies, when the Home Office issued its ten-year Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts in 2019, Mr King’s Clearsprings was one of the big winners.
It got guarantees of funding to provide all migrant housing in southern England and Wales, while Serco and Mears cover the rest of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Rather than owning the properties involved, Clearsprings rents them long-term from a multitude of different landlords. It then subcontracts to other firms to feed residents and help them access services including GPs.
The Home Office says details of migrant accommodation contracts are confidential for commercial reasons, but they have been estimated to cost the taxpayer an average of £117.64 per migrant every day.
Earlier this year Home Office data suggested Clearsprings, Serco and Mears had taken in total taken over 363 hotels in England, 20 in Northern Ireland, ten in Scotland, and two in Wales.
The Government’s Bibby Stockholm giant barge now docked off Portland in Dorset had begun to admit a trickle of migrants this week, amid legal challenges and objections, in a bid to cut accommodation costs. Last night it lay empty after they were evacuated following the discovery of Legionella bacteria in the water system.
But there are unlikely ever to be enough barges, or berths for them, to take more than a small fraction, and the Government’s plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda has stalled legally.
Labour’s immigration spokesman Stephen Kinnock has said: ‘Failure is allowing Clearsprings’ shareholders to trouser large sums off the back of the Goverment’s self-inflicted asylum crisis – at the expense of British taxpayers.’
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