Housing asylum seekers in military camps is an expensive mistake – and the Home Office knows it

In June, then Home Office minister Angela Eagle told the Home Affairs Select Committee why the Conservative government’s failed attempt to send people seeking safety to live in limbo in militarised fields was an expensive mistake.

She outlined the difficulties encountered trying to convert former military sites in Yorkshire, Wales, Kent and Essex, including “asbestos-filled buildings, poisoned land, unexploded ordinance and all those sorts of things”. And she expressed her wish for “different, better ways of trying to achieve this kind of service”. 

Just four months later, there is new leadership in the Home Office, but no new ideas. Military facilities in Inverness, Scotland and Crowborough, East Sussex are to be operationalised and 900 people are to find themselves subject to the controversy and abuse surrounding those living in hotels, or worse.

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The Home Office claims it learned “quite a lot of lessons” from its failures in camps and barges. Its track record gives cause for concern. In 2021, prisons inspectors slammed new sites in Napier, Kent and Penally, Wales as “filthy” and “decrepit”. The camps became targets for ‘hard-right extremists’, clashing with police and intimidating those living inside and local communities.

In 2023 legionella was found on the notorious white elephant Bibby Stockholm. And Leonard Farruku, a vulnerable, ill young man took his own life. He was placed on the barge despite evidence of a mental health crisis which was overlooked.

This year, courts found the still-open camp in Wethersfield in Essex, housed torture survivors unlawfully. Doctors found  “prison-like conditions” and “intense suffering”. Amid this cruelty was huge expense. The former government jettisoned £15 million of taxpayers’ money on an asbestos-ridden site in Bexhill, Sussex – a figure paling only in comparison to the £48m lost at RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire. 

And here we go again. Ministers are equivocal this time round that their plans will save money. There is already £1.3m in contracts on offer at the Scottish site. More waste, more suffering. This is no solution.

But there are alternatives. Realistic proposals are out there to move towards ending the stranglehold of private contractors, who make millions while people suffer, giving more control to local and regional bodies. Incentives for councils and housing associations to invest in and buy new properties for social housing could tackle the segregation harming our communities, creating assets for all.

Meanwhile, a better-run, fairer asylum system, where applicants are allowed to work and where people can access legal aid, would ensure people can get on with rebuilding their lives much faster. It currently costs £23.25 a night to house people in homes in communities, compared to the £132-per-night cost of Wethersfield. Government would do well to think creatively: there is money to be saved investing in communities, not camps. 

The return to failed warehousing sites adds to many recent assaults on people seeking protection in a system which inflicts trauma: stopping refugees reuniting with family; banning them from citizenship; planning to double, to ten years, the period of limbo before the security of settlement is granted; halving the time new refugees get to secure a roof over their heads.

Yet despite all this and through all the toxicity, we see precisely those people doing what people do best: holding their struggles and keeping their dignity.  In the words of one group who have spent time living in hotels: “Our dreams of a better tomorrow may be similar to yours. We hope you will see us not as strangers, but as new neighbours who want to live in peace and grow together with you.”

Julia Savage is campaigns manager at Asylum Matters and works on the Communities Not Camps campaign that calls for an end to all camp-style asylum accommodation.

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