Exclusive: Government hands private firms £3bn in bid to ‘stop the boats’

The UK government says smugglers profit off human desperation in the English Channel. But we, a team of researchers, believe they’re not the only ones. Our work has found that private companies have received more than £3.5bn of public money in an economy connected to border management over the past seven years. This includes contracts specifically related to the regulation of people moving across the English Channel in small boats, and for the provision of indirect services in the economy.

The government makes it difficult for people to access this information – there is no publicly available database of all such contracts it holds with private firms. Some contracts have not been made public at all, and even in those that have, some figures have been redacted. All of this means that the real amount spent is likely far higher than our research was able to uncover.

Amid this state-level secrecy, we have put together a report of findings as well as a spreadsheet to help the public better understand the UK’s border-industrial complex. It details 217 contracts between the government and private firms for border security and the management of the Channel: including search and rescue operations, the processing of asylum seekers arriving in the UK on small boats, and border surveillance and technologies that likely apply to the Channel and the port of Dover as part of broader border security.

We detail contracts related to border control in our report and this includes search and rescue operations in the Channel. We argue that whilst search and rescue operation contracts (conducted by Border Force, the Coast Guard or other agencies) are categorically different to surveillance and security technologies, they are connected because of the way that people are pushed into dangerous maritime routes which then demand maritime rescue.

Our data reveals that business is booming for companies involved in the border economy. Those included on our spreadsheet range from small regional outfits operating coaches to multinational defence contractors implicated in the conflicts that displaced many of those crossing the Channel in small boats. For these larger firms, both wars and the refugees they produce are business opportunities.

Desperate journeys

For thousands of people with no feasible or safe route to reach the UK to apply for asylum, crossing the Channel in a small boat becomes a risk they must take. Almost every day, people continue to take that risk, and they increasingly lose their lives doing so.

Successive UK governments have devised plans to “stop the boats”. From the since-abandoned plan to send asylum-seeking people to Rwanda to the decision to house hundreds of new arrivals to the UK on the Bibby Stockholm barge, recent years have seen an alarming trend towards government authoritarianism in immigration policy, and the weakening of international protection rights to which the UK has committed.

Various UK prime ministers have stressed a need to “stop the boats” or “smash the gangs” operating in the Channel. But these are not strategies implemented by a single arm of government. They are policies designed to be delivered by multiple agencies, with hundreds of contracted services provided by private businesses.

Behind almost every piece of infrastructure, every form of surveillance, every maritime rescue and processing of Channel migrants are private companies working to win contracts, implement policy and accrue profits. Tech giants, arms firms, and private security contractors are gradually expanding to facilitate control over international borders. Globally, this market is projected to grow from $377bn in 2023 to $679bn by 2032.

Billions spent on contracts

A year ago, as researchers from the universities of Liverpool, Nottingham, Sheffield and York, we set out to build a deeper understanding of private sector involvement on the Channel border.

We trawled through databases of tender and contract opportunities for private companies advertised by the Home Office through its Commercial Crown Service website, and through private tender advisory services such as Contract Finder Pro and BidStats.

The information was not easily accessible. Contracts are hard to find, and agreements are often heavily redacted by the Home Office. Last year, the Parliamentary Research Office noted the difficulty of tracking the money that the UK government has given to its French counterpart in numerous deals relating to border security over the past two decades. We had a similar experience researching the contracts the government holds with private companies.

We did, however, manage to find £3.5bn worth of government contractsdistributed to firms to manage people arriving in the UK by small boats between 2017 and 2024. On top of this, we also uncovered over £1bn available in open tenders as of December 2024. We have now released all of this data in a publicly available spreadsheet as well as a report detailing all we believe we’ve learned.

The Channel is a closely monitored stretch of water. Companies providing surveillance are responsible for sentry towers, maritime patrols, CCTV cameras, AI satellite-surveillance, aerial drones, heat-sensor scanners, walls and fences, and reception centres and detention facilities.

All of this requires staffing: security guards to patrol the perimeters of lorry parks, ferry ports and detention facilities; and health workers, drivers and administrators to process each person who is intercepted and brought to shore.

This border-industrial complex goes beyond the Channel border zone, reaching into the UK on a scale that we have not yet fully mapped out. It also goes beyond this country. The British state provided France with £800m for Channel-related border security between 2014-2026, including £464m between 2023 and 2026. It is likely the French state is also using private companies to secure the border, as it has done in the past.

The UK government continues to look for new ways to expand its spending and control. One of the objectives of the new Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill is to establish a legal basis for the £150m ‘Border Security Command’, which intends to “unlock sophisticated new technology” to track and intervene in the so-called ‘smuggling gangs’.

The companies profiting from misery

Some firms on the list are making significant profits from the securitisation of the Channel.

Since 2016, Mitie Group PLC, a well-used contractor for public sector work in infrastructure, facilities management, energy and healthcare, has run holding facilities in transit terminals in northern France paid for by the British government. In 2018, it secured £514m to escort detained asylum seekers between holding facilities both abroad and in the UK. And in 2022, it also won a £53m contract to run the infamous Manston reception centre in Kent, which is currently facing an independent inquiry for its “egregious” conditions. That contract was extended to 2024.

The Home Office is currently advertising a £700m contract for the management of Manston and the Western Jet Foil in Dover, a short-term holding facility where people are taken after they disembark from Border Force boats.

Technology companies Fujitsu and IBM secured £55m and £65.6m respectively between 2018 and 2022 for biometric services to track people who may be attempting to enter the UK. Construction firm Galliford Try benefited from contracts worth £172m in 2024, for the reconstruction of two detention facilities in the UK as part of the now-scrapped Rwanda plan.

Military technology against migrants

The UK’s border security is also entrusted to companies manufacturing weapons and military technology.

Israeli arms company Elbit Systems, which has boasted of having “combat-proven” its technology in Palestine, received nearly £1m from the Home Office for drone technology at the border between 2017 and 2021. The government department also paid over £1bn to Portuguese company Tekever, which works with the Ukrainian military, for drones and maritime surveillance in 2020. In January 2025, the Home Office was offering £19m for further “aerial intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance” in the Channel.

In 2023 the Home Office also paid out £38m to BAE Systems, another defence contractor, for developing a risk assessment system along passenger and freight routes across the UK borders and in port locations such as Dover. The company is the UK’s largest defence manufacturer, with a revenue of over £26bn last year.

These larger corporations are backed financially by a global web of asset management, private investment and insurance companies, many of which are also deeply involved in the security, arms and border industry.

We also found a plethora of contracts for small companies providing coach travel, sniffer dogs, marquees, catering, vessel servicing, and storage containers.

Between 2020 and 2024, The Kings Ferry coach company received £2.7m for coach services for Border Force. In 2022, Wagtail UK received £23.4m for the provision of sniffer dogs. And in 2023, Speedy Asset Services Limited was paid £7.7m for marquees as temporary accommodation during screening processes.

The smallest contract we identified was £6,000, which was paid to Fast Engineering Ltd for custody suite bedding at Border Force facilities.

Our findings are certainly an underestimation of government spending in this area. This is partly because some agreements, such as the £1bn Tekever contract, have been renewed, but the updated costs were redacted from public tendering documents.

Other contracts have simply not been publicly announced. In 2023, the Financial Times reported that US military contractor Anduril had installed a sentry watchtower at the Dover Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centre. We’ve seen this watchtower with our own eyes, but there is no public record of the contract for it. The Home Office has declined Freedom of Information requests about it.

A manufactured crisis, a profitable fix

The expansion of the UK’s border industry is not happening in a vacuum. It comes against a backdrop of increasing anti-immigration rhetoric, far-right nationalism and widening privatisation.

As the UK government announces sweeping cuts to disability benefits, slashes public sector jobs, and imposes austerity measures designed to fuel growth for a privileged few, the business model of bordering is thriving unchecked.

Such profits come at the expense of UK taxpayers as well as the people forced to make dangerous journeys across the Channel. It reportedly costs migrants up to £6,000 per person to traverse the Channel in a small boat. Yet a cross-Channel ferry ticket costs just £50. If people seeking asylum could gain access to such routes, they could make their journeys safely, and apply for asylum on British soil.

But the UK government doesn’t operate with this logic. It’s more politically expedient to keep up the business of bordering.

If borders actually stopped irregular migration then the business opportunities in the Channel, much like smuggling, would end. But without any available legal routes for those who want to come to the UK, borders do the opposite; they produce irregular migration. This creates business for smugglers and border security companies alike.

Decades of research have found that border securitisation does not work. But this does not deter the UK government or the companies fulfilling the contracts. Rather, it holds the promise of more lucrative contracts ahead. In this sense, borders do work; they work to bolster the political aspirations of the Nigel Farages and Kier Starmers of this world, and to offer a host of money-making opportunities for the corporations who benefit from their policy programmes.

Lucy Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Co-Director of the Migration Research Group at the University of Sheffield. Joe Turner is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York. Thom Davies is Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. Arshad Isakjee is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool. Tesfalem Yemane is a visiting fellow at the University of Leeds.

Photo: openDemocracy