Mitie Care and Custody fails to block Home Office immigration contract award

The High Court has lifted the automatic suspension preventing the Home Office from proceeding with a contract award for immigration reception services at Western Jet Foil and Manston, ruling in Mitie Care and Custody Limited v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 867 (TCC) that Mitie had not established that damages would be an inadequate remedy if its procurement challenge ultimately succeeded.

The Contract, awarded to a consortium led by MTC Definitive Limited, consolidates what had previously been six separate supplier arrangements for the processing of irregular migrants — principally those arriving via small boat crossings — into a single operator services agreement intended to run for a minimum of six years. The Sites process between 30,000 and 45,000 Service Users per annum, and the Home Office argued that the consolidated model offered material improvements in accountability, staffing flexibility, and cost control that were being delayed by the suspension.

Mitie, the incumbent operator, mounted a three-limb challenge. Two limbs concerned whether MTCD's bid departed from the minimum staffing requirements prescribed in the procurement documentation, and whether its price was abnormally low. A third limb, advanced by way of a proposed amendment served on the eve of the hearing, raised a conflict of interest arising from a former senior Home Office employee joining MTCD shortly before the procurement commenced. Mr Roger ter Haar KC, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, noted that this last ground had in practice been "demoted to an also ran" and declined to resolve the proposed amendment at the interlocutory stage.

Applying the familiar American Cyanamid framework, the judge confirmed that the Home Office conceded a serious issue to be tried, but found that Mitie had failed to discharge the burden of proving that damages would be inadequate. Mitie advanced a cluster of arguments frequently encountered in procurement litigation: loss of a unique market-consolidating contract; erosion of specialist personnel and expertise; reputational harm in a sector where Immigration Removal Centre contracts were imminently coming to market; and a "snowball effect" benefiting MTCD in future procurements.

The judge was unpersuaded. Drawing on Sysmex (UK) Ltd v Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, he reaffirmed that it is "fundamentally wrong in principle" to treat an award of damages as incapable of restoring a reputation damaged by the wrongful rejection of a tender, given that a merits judgement itself provides public vindication. Mitie's reputational harm arguments were held to be unsupported by evidence of how third parties would actually regard the loss of the contract, particularly given that Mitie retains a substantial portfolio of analogous contracts with the Home Office. On specialist staffing, the judge distinguished cases such as Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust where loss of personnel threatened a claimant's capacity to function at all, finding that Mitie's continuing obligations under its existing contracts would demand retention of materially the same workforce.

On the balance of convenience, the position was straightforward. Damages being adequate for Mitie, the inability to compensate the Home Office financially for delayed implementation of a revised operational model — one designed to improve service delivery for a politically significant and vulnerable population — meant the suspension had to fall. The application for an expedited trial was dismissed as unnecessary once adequacy of damages had been resolved against Mitie.

The judgement consolidates recent authority on the standard of evidence required in procurement suspension applications and provides a concise restatement of the applicable principles from Cubic Transportation Systems v Transport for London [2026] EWHC 61 (TCC), decided by the same judge only weeks earlier.