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Why is the UK’s Labour government planning to house asylum-seekers on military sites again, considering the controversial and grim history of previous attempts?
Let’s look at this story as it is being reported by the BBC:
Hundreds of asylum seekers could be housed in two military sites in Inverness and East Sussex as the government seeks to end the use of hotels.
Discussions are under way over the use of the sites to accommodate 900 men, as first reported in the Times. There are around 32,000 asylum seekers currently being housed in hotels.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told the BBC he had told Home Office and Ministry of Defence officials to “go faster, go further” to locate appropriate military sites.
Military bases been used before – scandalously.
They were in such poor condition that people housed there caught serious illnesses and died.
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The new Labour proposal strongly echoes the former Conservative government’s failed experiment with sites such as Napier Barracks in Kent and Penally Camp in Wales (the latter of which closed in 2021).
Here’s what happened before:
Napier Barracks (in Folkestone) was first used under the Johnson government in September 2020, supposedly as a temporary, “basic but adequate” site for up to 400 single men. In reality, it quickly became a public health and human rights scandal:
- The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration found that the Home Office had ignored public health advice about overcrowding and poor ventilation.
- A major COVID-19 outbreak infected more than 200 residents in early 2021.
- The High Court ruled in June 2021 that conditions at Napier were “inadequate” and that the Home Office had acted unlawfully in detaining people there without proper safeguards.
- Reports from NGOs such as Freedom from Torture, Refugee Action, and Amnesty International documented severe mental health deterioration, with residents describing the place as “prison-like” and “worse than what we fled”.
- There were also reports of fires, suicide attempts, and self-harm linked to despair and neglect.
Penally Camp (Pembrokeshire) was similarly condemned by inspectors for being unsanitary and unsafe.
It closed in April 2021 after intense local and national criticism.
Even Wethersfield, one of the two remaining bases still in use, has drawn fresh scrutiny under Labour:
-
Residents and aid groups have reported mould, cold, poor sanitation and isolation.
-
The Refugee Council said the conditions “retraumatise” vulnerable people who have fled conflict and torture.
The history of housing asylum seekers on military sites has not only been “tried before”; it has been proven unsafe and legally indefensible.
That is why observers like This Writer are already warning that Starmer’s plan — even if repackaged as “temporary” or “cost-saving” — risks repeating the same failures under a new badge.
The question is whether Labour will genuinely improve standards or simply rehash a failed Tory policy in the name of cost-cutting and “public appetite”.
And the following may well take us some way towards an uncomfortable answer…
Welcome to the asylum and immigration scandal you rarely hear about: the one that isn’t actually about asylum seekers, but about political failure, and the middle men turning a tidy profit on the consequences.
The Conservative-chaired home affairs select committee accused the Home Office of wasting potentially billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on a 10-year contract with three providers to house asylum seekers in private rented properties and, more controversially, in hotels.
The committee found that the estimated costs for the deal signed in 2019 with three big providers – the aforementioned Serco, plus Clearsprings and Mears – have tripled from £4.5bn to an eye-watering £15.3bn. The Home Office was so focused on “high-risk, poorly planned” wheezes such as sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, the committee found, that it lost control of the basics, including the day-to-day business of managing all the asylum seekers stuck in limbo while it chased political rainbows.
So: the entire asylum accommodation system has become a profit-making racket for outsourcing companies, enabled by Home Office mismanagement and political theatre.
The previous Tory government decided to outsource the housing of asylum-seekers to three big private contractors – Serco, Mears and Clearsprings – who received long-term, badly-written deals worth billions of pounds.
They found that the most profitable way of dealing with the issue was to put migrants in hotels – so they did.
As a result, the cost to the government has ballooned from £4.5 billion originally to £15.3 billion, including millions paid for non-existent rooms and profits the government never clawed back.
This is an indictment of waste and capture, not of asylum-seekers themselves – but asylum-seekers have paid the price, with “traumatised people [spending] years cooped up in hotel rooms never designed for the purpose, increasingly fearful of the angry protesters gathering at the gates, while the far right has found itself a powerful grievance”.
The privateers have profited handsomely from the chaos, while the Home Office effectively lost control of the system.
So when ministers talk about “closing asylum hotels”, they are cleaning up a mess that was created by government.
Given this context, we can now conclude that the decision to take asylum-seekers back to military bases is a recycled political gimmick.
Quick fixes like hotels and barracks are symptoms of the government’s refusal — under both the Tories and now Labour — to rebuild a functional asylum system.
Asylum claims used to be processed within six months in nearly 90 per cent of cases (as recorded in 2014) but by 2023 that had fallen to 16 per cent.
Instead of fixing that, successive governments chased “tough” optics — deportations, sending people to Rwanda, or containment in camps — while the private sector cashed in.
The moral and political thread is the same: successive governments have turned human suffering into a business model.
Labour may believe it can do the same thing “more efficiently”, but the historical record — Napier Barracks, Wethersfield, Penally — suggests otherwise.
The asylum-accommodation saga is not a “problem of too many migrants”; it is a state-enabled profiteering scandal — with military sites merely the next stage in a long cycle of exploitation and political manipulation.
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Military sites for asylum-seekers: Labour is turning human suffering into a profiteering scandal
Share this post:
Why is the UK’s Labour government planning to house asylum-seekers on military sites again, considering the controversial and grim history of previous attempts?
Let’s look at this story as it is being reported by the BBC:
Military bases been used before – scandalously.
They were in such poor condition that people housed there caught serious illnesses and died.
The new Labour proposal strongly echoes the former Conservative government’s failed experiment with sites such as Napier Barracks in Kent and Penally Camp in Wales (the latter of which closed in 2021).
Here’s what happened before:
Napier Barracks (in Folkestone) was first used under the Johnson government in September 2020, supposedly as a temporary, “basic but adequate” site for up to 400 single men. In reality, it quickly became a public health and human rights scandal:
Penally Camp (Pembrokeshire) was similarly condemned by inspectors for being unsanitary and unsafe.
It closed in April 2021 after intense local and national criticism.
Even Wethersfield, one of the two remaining bases still in use, has drawn fresh scrutiny under Labour:
Residents and aid groups have reported mould, cold, poor sanitation and isolation.
The Refugee Council said the conditions “retraumatise” vulnerable people who have fled conflict and torture.
The history of housing asylum seekers on military sites has not only been “tried before”; it has been proven unsafe and legally indefensible.
That is why observers like This Writer are already warning that Starmer’s plan — even if repackaged as “temporary” or “cost-saving” — risks repeating the same failures under a new badge.
The question is whether Labour will genuinely improve standards or simply rehash a failed Tory policy in the name of cost-cutting and “public appetite”.
And the following may well take us some way towards an uncomfortable answer…
So: the entire asylum accommodation system has become a profit-making racket for outsourcing companies, enabled by Home Office mismanagement and political theatre.
The previous Tory government decided to outsource the housing of asylum-seekers to three big private contractors – Serco, Mears and Clearsprings – who received long-term, badly-written deals worth billions of pounds.
They found that the most profitable way of dealing with the issue was to put migrants in hotels – so they did.
As a result, the cost to the government has ballooned from £4.5 billion originally to £15.3 billion, including millions paid for non-existent rooms and profits the government never clawed back.
This is an indictment of waste and capture, not of asylum-seekers themselves – but asylum-seekers have paid the price, with “traumatised people [spending] years cooped up in hotel rooms never designed for the purpose, increasingly fearful of the angry protesters gathering at the gates, while the far right has found itself a powerful grievance”.
The privateers have profited handsomely from the chaos, while the Home Office effectively lost control of the system.
So when ministers talk about “closing asylum hotels”, they are cleaning up a mess that was created by government.
Given this context, we can now conclude that the decision to take asylum-seekers back to military bases is a recycled political gimmick.
Quick fixes like hotels and barracks are symptoms of the government’s refusal — under both the Tories and now Labour — to rebuild a functional asylum system.
Asylum claims used to be processed within six months in nearly 90 per cent of cases (as recorded in 2014) but by 2023 that had fallen to 16 per cent.
Instead of fixing that, successive governments chased “tough” optics — deportations, sending people to Rwanda, or containment in camps — while the private sector cashed in.
The moral and political thread is the same: successive governments have turned human suffering into a business model.
Labour may believe it can do the same thing “more efficiently”, but the historical record — Napier Barracks, Wethersfield, Penally — suggests otherwise.
The asylum-accommodation saga is not a “problem of too many migrants”; it is a state-enabled profiteering scandal — with military sites merely the next stage in a long cycle of exploitation and political manipulation.
Support Vox Political!
With social media algorithms acting as gatekeepers – allowing users to read only what their owners want them to, sites like Vox Political need the support of our readers like never before.
You can help by making a donation:
https://Ko-fi.com/voxpolitical
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