The former top civil servant at the Department for International Development has warned a lack of oversight in spending echoes corrupt contracts awarded during Covid

The billions of pounds spent on housing asylum seekers is ripe for the kind of “scam and scandal” that emerged in the contracts awarded during the Covid pandemic, the Observer has been told.

A crippling collapse of the systems and expertise monitoring the use of Britain’s aid budget over several years means that there has been a dangerous lack of oversight of the £4.3bn spent annually on asylum seekers in the UK, according to a damning assessment of Whitehall’s control over the spending.