Australia’s asylum seeker policy has delivered up to $10bn to private contractors, with offshore contracts alone valued at $859,363 per person

The Australian government’s policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers has benefited contractors by up to $10bn since mid-2007.

Guardian Australia has conducted an analysis of contracts in the AusTender database awarded by the Department of Immigration and containing keywords relating to the mandatory detention system. You can read more about the specific methods below.



The analysis reveals for the first time the scale of the privatised detention system, with 1,770 contracts awarded to 522 entities.



The bulk of the funds have gone to service providers including Serco Australia, Transfield Services, International Health and Medical Services, G4S Australia, construction companies such as Canstruct and John Holland, and charities such as the Salvation Army.



Many of these contractors then employ subcontractors to carry out various tasks. The top 20 contractors employed 141 subcontractors in industries ranging from construction to catering.

Serco Australia has been the biggest beneficiary, with two contracts worth a total of $3.2bn, including the overall single largest contract worth $2.9bn. Serco Australia is contracted to manage various onshore detention facilities.

The contract value does not necessarily equate to the total amount paid to the contractor, and Guardian Australia understands that detention centre contract values may be higher than they need to be to account for the possibility of detention centres having higher than expected populations.

Transfield Services has nine contracts worth a total of $2.46bn, including a recent contract for $2.1bn to manage the offshore detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

The Salvation Army has been awarded four contracts for a total of $113.2m, with three covering “welfare and support services” for offshore detention and one covering welfare services for people in community detention.



Grouping the contracts by offshore and onshore facilities demonstrates the increased expense associated with detaining asylum seekers outside Australia.



By combining the contracts current within the past financial year with detention centre population data we can estimate a total contract spend per person for each location type. Construction contracts have been excluded for this analysis.

This assumes an even cost per day over the course of the contract – which would obviously not be the case, but it’s rather difficult to estimate otherwise. And again it is worth pointing out these costs are only indicative as the contract dollar values are not necessarily what is being paid out.

We can however get an idea of the difference in real values and the contract amount by comparing figures from the federal budget. In the Department of Immigration’s budget statements the total spend on their offshore and onshore detention programs in 2013-14 was $3.07bn. The value of contracts from our analysis for 2013-14 was $3.6bn, so there’s a $600m difference there.



From this estimate, offshore-related contracts were worth $859,363 a person, more than five times the spend for onshore-related contracts, which were worth $157,014 a person. Community detention related contracts were cheaper again, at only $131,723 a person.



Detention contract value by centre type Photograph: Guardian Australia

An estimate of government spending on each asylum seeker came in the commission of audit, which considered all costs (rather than just contracts) and put the cost of offshore detention per person at about $440,000 in 2013-14, and onshore at $239,000:



Cost of different detention types from the National Commission of Audit. Illustration: NCOA

G4S Australia, Transfield and the Salvation Army were all contacted for comment on the analysis and the nature of working offshore but directed Guardian Australia to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. The department did not respond to questions.



Update

I’ve added two contracts from IHMS and four from Red Cross. The Red Cross contracts significantly increased the contract values for community detention.

Methods

Contract information was obtained from data.gov.au and AusTender. The contracts were filtered by keyword to obtain those relating to detention centres and community detention, and then classified by detention centre type.