Taxpayers shelled out £6.6 billion on asylum seeker and refugee support schemes including trips to the zoo and tennis lessons, a Sunday Express investigation has revealed.

Sandwich deliveries, friendship services and even a visit to Sir Keir Starmer’s beloved Arsenal football stadium were also included in programmes to help them “integrate” into British life. The massive cost was racked up in 200 government and local council-funded schemes during the past five years.

Critics slammed the “bonkers” expenditure and said much of the money should have been spent on improving public services and communities instead. But the Refugee Council insisted that cutting them would leave refugees isolated, communities divided and the taxpayer poorer.

A dossier of information, handed to this newspaper by Reform UK, lifted the lid on the sheer scale and cost of the support schemes.

One contract detailed the “self-sufficient” Wethersfield Asylum Accommodation site, where arrivals were greeted with £20,620 worth of sports coaches and equipment for activities such as volleyball, tennis and athletics, four times a day, three days a week.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of pounds has been dedicated to “befriending schemes” where asylum seekers and refugees were allocated a ‘mentor’. Upon arrival to Bristol, Hull and the London borough of Newham, a befriender will be provided to each adult with the aim of promoting confidence building.

Organised group activities have included trips to London Zoo, Kew Gardens and Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium. Other contracts included sandwich delivery services worth almost £50,000. The value of each lunch was £4.45 with options including chicken, egg and mayo, with veggie and vegan selections too.

These were supplied weekly for refugees in both the Croydon and Kent Intake Units. An eye-popping £1.1million has also been spent on SIM cards for mobile phones, with the Home Office placing an initial order of 2,000 – with each one required to have “at least 60GB data”.

For comparison, most people used an average of 8GB of data per month in 2022 according to Ofcom. At the same time, nearly half a million pounds was spent on bus passes in Bristol, named in December as one of the UK’s top 10 cities for pedestrians, as the Home Office awarded hundreds of thousands of pounds to communication companies to conduct research studies on better understanding asylum seeker’s “needs”.

The extensive list of contracts covered a variety of other areas where expenditure was of great significance. The largest cost to the taxpayer was for accommodation, amounting to billions, with the furnishing of these dwellings totalling £2,388,000.

Support, assessments and services for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children also tallied a high number. Rupert Lowe MP, who helped Reform UK achieve its best election result last summer, said he believes local communities have been “destroyed” despite “integration” being at the forefront of the initiatives.

“If someone landed from out of space, they’d say we’ve gone bonkers,” Mr Lowe told the Sunday Express. “We’ve got these ridiculous contracts where we’re handing out money to groups who have never contributed to our society… Is that logic? I think it’s lunacy.”

The MP for Great Yarmouth in Norfolk added: “It’s causing all sorts of fractions in what were very stable local communities.” He believes many asylum seekers “often have a different view of women, culturally – they’re culturally different to us”.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said cutting these schemes would be a “false economy” and would have a negative effect on the UK.

He added: “I know refugees from all over the world who make amazing contributions to their communities and to our country. Many are success stories. Working in the NHS, running businesses that create jobs or working on our high streets.

“But when they arrived here, they needed help to unlock their skills and potential. Help to speak English, make friends or, when they received permission, to find a job and somewhere to rent. We all need a bit of help sometimes.”

But highlighting the £1.1million spent on English language classes, Mr Lowe explained how authorities “are spending fortunes on translation”, which he said “is wrong”. “If you come to live in our country, you live by our laws, you live by our codes, and also, you speak our language,” he said.

“If you can’t do that, then either use AI or you can pay for your own translator, but I don’t see why the honest decent British taxpayer should be funding all this nonsense.”

The contracts have been awarded since 2019 under both the Conservative and Labour governments, both of whom Mr Lowe blamed for the colossal cost to the taxpayer.

“Neither of those parties are staffed by people who are capable of holding the civil service to account,” he said. “As a result of that we’ve got this woke movement which has effectively undermined the people they’re supposed to be serving, which is the British taxpayer.”

Alp Mehmet, the chair of Migrant Watch UK, echoed the concerns of Mr Lowe, saying the “British people deserve better”.

“This is a scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money which could have been avoided by firm action early on,” he adds.

“It was allowed to surge out of control under the Tories and is now being made worse by Keir Starmer’s Government, by their absurd focus on foreign gangs and removing what deterrence there was.”

Father-of-four Mr Lowe, 67, has been steadfast in his backing of the Trump-style method of “detain and deport”, explaining how those who arrive in Britain illegally should be “processed offshore” on “some obscure island”.

The businessman, a former chairman of Southampton FC, has called for the “return of common sense”, using the US President and his “anti-woke” agenda as an example that Britain should be following.

He added: “Elon Musk is performing an incredibly valuable role for Donald Trump in exposing the oxygen that gives life to all of this nonsense.”

New figures last week showed a total of 108,138 people applied for asylum in the UK in 2024, the highest number for any 12 month period since current records began in 2001.

It was an 18% hike since 2023, according to figures published by the Home Office.

Despite the number allowed to stay dropping to 39,600, the total being housed in hotels has increased to 38,079 despite Labour’s pledge to end their use.

More than 1,000 migrants arrived in the UK on small boats in the first four days of this month, taking the total arrivals for the year so far to more than 3,200.

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Jonathan Eida, researcher at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, labelled the schemes as “bizarre”, claiming that councils should be focusing taxpayers’ money on local issues such as rubbish collection.

He said: “Brits will be enraged that their money is going towards these contracts.

“Taxpayers expect councils to spend their hard-earned cash on fixing potholes and collecting bins, not bizarre befriending schemes for asylum seekers.

“Town hall bosses should focus on what matters to residents, not throw money at those who shouldn’t be in the country in the first place.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The government is required by law to provide support to asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute, but we are determined to ensure value for money in all future contracts, and have introduced new controls to minimise non-essential spending which were not in place when the majority of these contracts were signed under the previous government.“Overall, we are determined to restore order to the asylum system so that it operates swiftly, firmly and fairly, and it remains our commitment to cut the costs of asylum accommodation, including ending the use of hotels over time.”