£28m of our money wasted on the asylum centre that never was.

I was going to start this story by going into the background of this farcical waste of our money, but while I studied reports into this idiocy something came to me:

PRISONS. There were to be ten of these detention centres built, but a drop in asylum requests made some of them pointless. For example the one in Bicester that the Home Office spent £28m on but never built, could hold 3000 people. Assuming the other nine sites were to be on a similar scale, then we could possibly accommodate up to 30,000 people.

If we had already spent £28m on this site, surely it would have been quite easy to modify the building plans to build a low security prison (which in effect, is what a detention centre is). Surely to God someone at the Home Office should have thought of this.

The Public Accounts Committee chairman Edward Leigh said the Home Office had to explain why the land was "sitting dormant" he added "No one seems to have any idea what to do with it."

Why didn't anyone think of using this land for building the prisons that we so desperately need? Surely if the land is there, and the money is there, then a kid on work experience at the Home Office could have worked that out.

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