MEARS, the company used by the Home Office to provide asylum accommodation in Northern Ireland, Scotland and parts of England, has handed back £13.8 million after making more profit than its contract allows. Northern Ireland was its most profitable area.

The BBC reported this from the perspective of an asylum seeker formerly resident in a hotel in Northern Ireland, who believed the excess profit should have been spent on a better standard of accommodation.

Since last year, the Home Office has required Mears to house people in the community rather than in hotels. So from everyone else’s perspective, the less it spends here the better, as it is competing with everyone else in the property market and the private rental market in particular.

The DUP has claimed Mears has hundreds of empty houses in Northern Ireland with bed space for around 1,000 people and it is demanding these properties be released.

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This does look like an excessive level of spare capacity. There are typically fewer than 3,000 asylum seekers in Northern Ireland at any given time, it is Home Office policy not to relocate any here from Britain, and there only about 250 people still in hotels.

But Mears does not have to explain itself to anyone here, as it pointed out to the DUP in a recent meeting. It is answerable to the Home Office, immigration is not devolved, and that is that as far as Mears and the Home Office are concerned.

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The Executive has announced it aims to subsidise half of childcare costs for working parents by 2032. It has not announced where the money will come from – a fascinating question........

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