Home Office spent millions on ‘ineffective’ adverts to deter asylum seekers with more now planned on Rwanda campaign
The government has given at least £2.7m to a company behind “inhumane and ineffective” communications programmes trying to reduce small boat crossings, it can be revealed.
It is now planning to pay £100,000 for a separate drive to advertise the Rwanda deal in different languages on social media, in the hope that migrants will be put off travelling to Britain.
An investigation by The Independent shows that the Home Office has funded numerous “migration behavioural change” campaigns in recent years with the aim of deterring irregular journeys.
But the number of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats rocketed to a record of over 28,000 last year.
Data revealed under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request showed the Home Office has paid Hong Kong-based firm Seefar £2.7m since 2016.
The company describes itself as a “leader in the migration field”, which conducts “migration awareness-raising and behavioural change campaigns”.
It is behind websites including “On The Move” and “The Migrant Project”, which claim to “enable migrant migrants to make informed decisions” and offer advice and helplines in multiple languages.
A breakdown obtained by The Independent showed the Home Office has given Seefar six-figure sums for projects including “France migrant comms” and “overseas communications”.
The most recent chunk of funding was for a £40,600 “migrant deterrence communications campaign” in 2020-21.
It saw Seefar set up a website called On The Move, which had a .org domain and appeared to be a charity “providing migrants in transit with reliable migration information”.
The site focused on “the risks of irregular migration” and encouraged readers to use “safe and legal alternatives” – without detailing how to claim asylum or apply for resettlement in the UK.
“You have a choice,” read the On The Move website. “Don’t risk your life and waste hard earned money trying to reach the UK.”
The Home Office paid a further £23,200 for targeted adverts to be placed on Facebook and Instagram in English, Kurdish, Arabic, Persian and Pashto, linking to the website and carrying slogans including “don’t put you or your child’s life in danger”, “we will return you” and “there is no hiding place”.
No analysis of the campaign’s effectiveness has been made public and On The Move was deleted following the end of the Home Office contract in December.
The 2019-20 financial year – when Channel crossings rose steeply and Priti Patel became home secretary – saw the greatest spending.
More than £1.3m was given to Seefar for services listed as “overseas comms project Afghanistan”, “upstream migrant comms”, “Northern France comms work” and “France migrant comms”.
Between 2018 and 2020, three large payments of between £185,000 and £272,000 each were listed for The Migrant Project website, without further details.
Separate payments from 2016-17 totalling almost £415,000 were listed as “blank” in the FOI release.
The government is due to give Seefar an undisclosed amount of money under an ongoing three-year contract to provide a “training provision framework”, for a department that “delivers strategic capability development programmes overseas on behalf of the Home Office”.
The ‘contact us’ section of the On The Move website, which has since been deleted
