Downing Street has defended the prospect of paying more to house asylum seekers in disused barracks instead of hotels, arguing that quelling public disquiet was worth any extra cost.
As refugee organisations and local politicians described plans to house tens of thousands of people in ex-military sites as “fanciful” and “too expensive”, No 10 said that “communities don’t want asylum seekers housed in hotels, and neither does the government”.
The comments came after the Home Office confirmed on Tuesday that it planned to use the Cameron barracks in Inverness and Crowborough training camp in East Sussex to house 900 male asylum seekers from next month.
Officials said they would be the first of as many as 10,000 people the Home Office hoped to house on military sites as it worked with the Ministry of Defence to find more disused sites.
Protests over using hotels to accommodate asylum seekers were held this summer across England, including in Bristol, Liverpool and London, as well as in Mold in Wales, Perth in Scotland and County Antrim in Northern Ireland.
Downing Street indicated that some higher costs of moving asylum seekers into military sites would be worthwhile because where they were housed had become “an issue of public confidence”.
The prime minister’s spokesperson said: “The costs will vary site by site, but our priorities are security and fairness. This is an issue of public confidence. We know that communities don’t want asylum seekers housed in hotels, and neither does the government, and that’s why we are determined to fix the mess that we’ve inherited by getting a grip of the issue and committing to close every single asylum hotel, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds.”
The Conservative government had also planned to save public money by moving asylum seekers into former RAF bases. However, an assessment by Whitehall’s spending watchdog last year found that plans to place hundreds of asylum seekers in the former RAF base at Scampton, in Lincolnshire, would have cost £45.1m more than hotels. Using RAF Wethersfield in Essex would have cost £500,000 less, the report found.
The chief executive of the Refugee Council, Enver Solomon, said accommodating such large numbers of people in barracks had been tried by the last government and had failed.
“The plans released overnight by the Home Office to house 10,000 people seeking asylum on military sites are fanciful, too expensive and too logistically difficult,” he said.
“The government could end the use of hotels next year, without resorting to camps, by putting in place a one-off scheme that would give permission to stay for a limited period – subject to rigorous security checks – to people from countries almost certain to be recognised as refugees,” he added.
The chief executive of Care4Calais, Steve Smith, said Labour was breaking its promise to end the use of barracks to house refugees, exposing the taxpayer to soaring costs. “Opening more camps will only serve to re-traumatise more people who have already survived horrors such as war and torture,” he said.
The Conservative MP for Sussex Weald, Nus Ghani, whose constituency includes the Crowborough site, said the plans were “wholly inappropriate”. She has launched a petition in an attempt to stop the scheme going ahead.
“Under the previous Conservative government, the Crowborough site was rejected outright. This was due to its layout and the difficulty in it being adapted and the extra costs that would be involved,” she said.
Shaun Fraser, Labour’s Scottish parliament candidate for Inverness and Nairn, said the proposal to use the Cameron Barracks was “a bizarre one given its status as a 19th-century military installation”.
Highland council has accused the UK government of failing to consider the local impact of moving hundreds of asylum seekers to barracks in the centre of Inverness.
A joint statement from the council’s convener, Bill Lobban, its SNP leader, Raymond Bremner, and the opposition leader, Alasdair Christie, on Tuesday morning said: “Our main concern is the impact this proposal will have on community cohesion given the scale of the proposals as they currently stand. Inverness is a relatively small community, but the potential impact locally and across the wider Highlands appears not to have been taken into consideration by the UK government.”
As of June this year, about 32,000 asylum seekers were being accommodated in hotels, down from a peak of more than 56,000 in 2023 but 2,500 more than at the same point last year.
Expected costs of Home Office accommodation contracts for 2019 to 2029 have more than tripled from £4.5bn to £15.3bn after what the Commons home affairs committee called a dramatic increase in demand.
In a further development, immigration enforcement visits have reached their highest level since comparable data began in 2011, Home Office data shows.
A total of 21,858 visits were recorded in the 12 months to September this year – up 38% from 15,894 in the previous 12-month period, and an increase of 56% on 13,990 visits that were carried out in the same period up to September 2012.
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