March last year, Robert Jenrick announced plans to open large scale accommodation sites across the country to tackle rising migration numbers.
But, the urgency with which the government aimed to get these sites up and running resulted in “missed milestones and significant delivery risks”, according to the Independent Projects Authority.
Local authorities in which sites were proposed, were not alerted before work got underway, causing anger from local residents.
One of these sites, is Northeye Barracks in Bexhill. A year on from the governments initial announcement, no progress has been made at the site, instigating backlash from local residents.
The local MP Huw Merriman, told residents at a public meeting that the site would be a closed facility. This is different to the non-detained site Wethersfield, in Essex, where asylum seekers are free to come and go.
But, the Home Office’s most recent fact sheet on the Bexhill site says that no decision on this has been confirmed.
Challenging the Home Office
According to a report by the National Audit Office, The Home Office secured some sites before communicating with local stakeholders about plans to reduce the risk of local opposition affecting its negotiations.
It also used emergency planning regulations so it can start work on sites quickly.
The Home Office now faces legal challenges on the grounds of planning regulations, the impact on local populations, and the impact on planned regeneration projects.
Jeff Newnham is head of the Save Northeye campaign, and started a crowd justice to raise money for a judicial review on these grounds.
Jeff says, “this isn’t an immigration issue, or an asylum matter. This is a planning issue, and that cuts through the left right divide of the country.”
“If it’s a big development, it would still be a planning issue if local people opposed it, and local people here have had half the value of their properties wiped out. The sum total of their life’s work being cut in half by someone in Westminster who couldn’t even point to Northeye on a map. Who’s just said, ‘let’s give that a go’, totally devoid of any responsibility for the havoc that they’ve wrecked.”
In an effort to move plans forward quickly, the Home Office prioritised speed in awarding contracts over competition.
A freedom of information request (FoI) submitted by a member of Jeff’s team, revealed that the government paid £15.3 million for the Northeye site in September 2023. It had previously sold for just £6.3 million a year earlier – an increase of almost 150%.
“The project is fiscally unsound. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The NAO report also disclosed that:
The Home Office is planning to scale back numbers at Wethersfield and other sites. By the end of January this year, the sites were expected to be housing around 1900 people between them. They are currently housing less than 900.
Reviews by the infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) repeatedly marked the Home Office’s work on large-scale accommodation as ‘red’. This means that the ‘successful delivery of the programme to time, cost and quality appears unachievable’.
The Home Office proceeded with three of the four sites on the basis of Accounting Officer advice so it could initiate projects quickly. Usually, departments would be expected to prepare business cases, ahead of starting any work, which would include a range of potential options for achieving the intended outcome. No alternative option to large sites was considered to increase asylum accommodation.
Residents say they are living “under the sword of Damocles”
Lyn Watt’s, a presenter on Bexhill Radio, says that when she conducted interviews about the Northeye site for her show, she wanted to present a balanced view. However, “every view that came back was negative against it.”
Lyn says people were, “naturally resentful” that those accommodated at the site would have access to healthcare, when wait times for their own GP were so long.
Lyn also says that residents had expressed “fear for their safety” regarding the original announcement for the site to be an open facility.
“As one of them said, where they need to get the bus is right by where the six form girls wait for their bus. Different cultures view women differently – there’s already been problems over in Boship, where they were being housed in the Boship hotel, to the point where they were going to get a posse of fathers because they were up-skirting some of the school girls at the bus stops and things like that.”
“How much of that is rumour, I don’t know.”
“It all fuels the fire.”
Nicola David is the founder of One Life to Live which campaigns against large-scale accommodation sites. She says she heard the same accusations against asylum seekers during her campaign against a proposed pilot site at Linton-on-Ouse.
“They’re not worried about them stealing their plant pots. They’re not worried about them shoplifting. It’s always sexually based. Always. Because that is the blue touch paper.”
“All you have to do is mention that and the whole community is up in arms. It’s always rape and murder of women and females.”
“It was exactly the same at Linton. A woman stood up in a meeting and said I will never be able to leave my house again. If a woman is crying because she’s afraid of being raped, who is not going to pay attention to that.”
The Home Office state that residents accommodated at the site will have been through the relevant security checks.
The NAO report reveals ‘major safeguarding incidents’ at the sites
Since the initial announcement of plans to use large-scale sites, charities have warned against the detrimental mental health impact of “othering people by putting them behind barbed wire.”
The Home Office is responsible for the safety of the people that it is accommodating. At the beginning of this year, it was still working with providers to develop specific measures to assess if the accommodation providers were keeping residents safe.
There have been a number of what the NAO report refers to as “major safeguarding incidents” on both the Bibby Stockholm vessel and the Wethersfield site.
In December 2023, 27-year old Leonard Farruku from Albania died aboard the Bibby Stockholm in a suspected suicide. There were two suicide attempts at Wethersfield in January of this year.
There have also been reports of unrest at Wethersfield. An FoI request submitted by City Investigates, shows that the number of violent incidents has been rising at Wethersfield since September last year.
It showed, there were eight separate violent fights between multiple inmates in February of this year.
A view of the courtyard on the Bibby Stockholm vessel. Lack of risk assessments has led to a rise in violent incidents onboard.
“People are scared of something they can’t understand or control”
Whilst opposition appears to underlie the attitude towards asylum seekers in Bexhill, this is not the case in surrounding areas.
A ten minute train journey down the coast, is the town of Hastings. Hastings is home to Sanctuary Festival, set up to celebrate the integration of refugees into the local community.
Jane Grimshaw is the co-chair of Hastings Community of Sanctuary. She originally helped set up the festival to welcome participants of the Syrian resettlement scheme.
Jane stumbled into the charity sector. Back in 2015, herself and a few friends made a Facebook group to discuss the migrant crisis in Calais, and what they could do to help. Within a week the group had 600 members. Within a month, it had over 1000 members.
In a bid to help, Jane previously posted on the group, asking people to buy affordable tracksuit bottoms from Primark to send to Calais. A bemused Primark employee said they couldn’t stack the shelves fast enough!
Jane also coordinated a first-response team to meet refugees as the boats came in onto the beaches of Hastings. They would check shipping apps so they could track when French or English emergency response boats were called, and kept plastic boxes in the back of their cars filled with cereal bars and fleece blankets.
(Play to listen to Jane describe one of her first-response efforts)
Jane says she thinks part of the problem with the Northeye site is its location.
“It’s in a little village on the outskirts of Bexhill, and I mean, Bexhill is tiny anyway, Bexhill is a small town.”
“But, I think if they were to propose that being opened on the edge of an estate in Hastings, you may well get the same response.”
“It’s quite a scary thing, to have an unknown put into your community, and the rhetoric in the press is very negative and I think people are scared. Scared of something they can’t understand or control.”
“I find the rhetoric from the residents very upsetting but I understand where it comes from and it comes from a place of fear.”
“You’ve got to find common ground with people. You have to find the point that you meet and expand out at that. The common ground in Northeye is that nobody wants it.”
“It’s the wrong plan and it’s the wrong place”.
“We don’t want people living there, not because we don’t want them in our country but because the accommodation there is inhumane, unsuitable and I don’t think these camps work in any way.”
What now?
The Home Office proceeded with its large sites on the basis that they would cost less than hotels. But, the latest assessments of value for money suggest that when sunk costs are included, the four large sites will cost approximately £46 million more than using hotels.
They expected the refurbishment of the sites to be around £5 million each for Wethersfield in Essex and Scampton in Lincolnshire.
These costs have since increased to £49 million for Wethersfield, and £27 million for Scampton, which is yet to open.
Despite setbacks in their plans for their large-scale accommodation plans, the government have continued to close hotels. The Home Office proposed to have stopped using 140 of the approximately 400 hotels it was using to accommodate asylum seekers by the end of last month.
Campaigners warn there is not enough detention space
Nicola David says that the Home Office is facing an accommodation crisis.
“They are closing so many hotels. They’ve reduced the numbers at Scampton. They’ve reduced the numbers at Wethersfield. The Bibby Stockholm may or may not be renewed. These are poultry numbers of people, and we are talking about thousands and thousands of people coming.”
In the last seven days, 1107 migrants have crossed into the UK in small boats.
The Illegal Migration Act passed in summer of 2023 states that ‘most people removed under the act will be detained before they are removed’.
“The detention estate isn’t big enough. We’ve only got one for sure going ahead which is Bexhill. But, who knows when that will be, they’ve been surveying for a year. We can’t give them tents, we don’t have housing. We are going to have hundreds of thousands of people on the streets.”
The Home Office is now developing a longer term strategy outlining accommodation needs for the next ten years.
It stated that it considers the experience in setting up large scale accommodation sites to have been valuable, because it now has a more realistic idea of the time, costs and risks associated with accommodation.
Toxicology reports continue to be carried out at Northeye Barracks, and future plans for the site remain unclear.
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HeadlineFailed experiment? Home Office’s plans for asylum sites labelled “unachievable”
Short HeadlineLocal asylum sites are facing backlash
StandfirstLocal communities say that uncertainty surrounding the Home Office's plans means they have been "living under the sword of Damocles"
March last year, Robert Jenrick announced plans to open large scale accommodation sites across the country to tackle rising migration numbers.
But, the urgency with which the government aimed to get these sites up and running resulted in “missed milestones and significant delivery risks”, according to the Independent Projects Authority.
Local authorities in which sites were proposed, were not alerted before work got underway, causing anger from local residents.
One of these sites, is Northeye Barracks in Bexhill. A year on from the governments initial announcement, no progress has been made at the site, instigating backlash from local residents.
The local MP Huw Merriman, told residents at a public meeting that the site would be a closed facility. This is different to the non-detained site Wethersfield, in Essex, where asylum seekers are free to come and go.
But, the Home Office’s most recent fact sheet on the Bexhill site says that no decision on this has been confirmed.
Challenging the Home Office
According to a report by the National Audit Office, The Home Office secured some sites before communicating with local stakeholders about plans to reduce the risk of local opposition affecting its negotiations.
It also used emergency planning regulations so it can start work on sites quickly.
The Home Office now faces legal challenges on the grounds of planning regulations, the impact on local populations, and the impact on planned regeneration projects.
Jeff Newnham is head of the Save Northeye campaign, and started a crowd justice to raise money for a judicial review on these grounds.
Jeff says, “this isn’t an immigration issue, or an asylum matter. This is a planning issue, and that cuts through the left right divide of the country.”
“If it’s a big development, it would still be a planning issue if local people opposed it, and local people here have had half the value of their properties wiped out. The sum total of their life’s work being cut in half by someone in Westminster who couldn’t even point to Northeye on a map. Who’s just said, ‘let’s give that a go’, totally devoid of any responsibility for the havoc that they’ve wrecked.”
In an effort to move plans forward quickly, the Home Office prioritised speed in awarding contracts over competition.
A freedom of information request (FoI) submitted by a member of Jeff’s team, revealed that the government paid £15.3 million for the Northeye site in September 2023. It had previously sold for just £6.3 million a year earlier – an increase of almost 150%.
“The project is fiscally unsound. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The NAO report also disclosed that:
The Home Office is planning to scale back numbers at Wethersfield and other sites. By the end of January this year, the sites were expected to be housing around 1900 people between them. They are currently housing less than 900.
Reviews by the infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) repeatedly marked the Home Office’s work on large-scale accommodation as ‘red’. This means that the ‘successful delivery of the programme to time, cost and quality appears unachievable’.
The Home Office proceeded with three of the four sites on the basis of Accounting Officer advice so it could initiate projects quickly. Usually, departments would be expected to prepare business cases, ahead of starting any work, which would include a range of potential options for achieving the intended outcome. No alternative option to large sites was considered to increase asylum accommodation.
Residents say they are living “under the sword of Damocles”
Lyn Watt’s, a presenter on Bexhill Radio, says that when she conducted interviews about the Northeye site for her show, she wanted to present a balanced view. However, “every view that came back was negative against it.”
Lyn says people were, “naturally resentful” that those accommodated at the site would have access to healthcare, when wait times for their own GP were so long.
Lyn also says that residents had expressed “fear for their safety” regarding the original announcement for the site to be an open facility.
“As one of them said, where they need to get the bus is right by where the six form girls wait for their bus. Different cultures view women differently – there’s already been problems over in Boship, where they were being housed in the Boship hotel, to the point where they were going to get a posse of fathers because they were up-skirting some of the school girls at the bus stops and things like that.”
“How much of that is rumour, I don’t know.”
“It all fuels the fire.”
Nicola David is the founder of One Life to Live which campaigns against large-scale accommodation sites. She says she heard the same accusations against asylum seekers during her campaign against a proposed pilot site at Linton-on-Ouse.
“They’re not worried about them stealing their plant pots. They’re not worried about them shoplifting. It’s always sexually based. Always. Because that is the blue touch paper.”
“All you have to do is mention that and the whole community is up in arms. It’s always rape and murder of women and females.”
“It was exactly the same at Linton. A woman stood up in a meeting and said I will never be able to leave my house again. If a woman is crying because she’s afraid of being raped, who is not going to pay attention to that.”
The Home Office state that residents accommodated at the site will have been through the relevant security checks.
The NAO report reveals ‘major safeguarding incidents’ at the sites
Since the initial announcement of plans to use large-scale sites, charities have warned against the detrimental mental health impact of “othering people by putting them behind barbed wire.”
The Home Office is responsible for the safety of the people that it is accommodating. At the beginning of this year, it was still working with providers to develop specific measures to assess if the accommodation providers were keeping residents safe.
There have been a number of what the NAO report refers to as “major safeguarding incidents” on both the Bibby Stockholm vessel and the Wethersfield site.
In December 2023, 27-year old Leonard Farruku from Albania died aboard the Bibby Stockholm in a suspected suicide. There were two suicide attempts at Wethersfield in January of this year.
There have also been reports of unrest at Wethersfield. An FoI request submitted by City Investigates, shows that the number of violent incidents has been rising at Wethersfield since September last year.
It showed, there were eight separate violent fights between multiple inmates in February of this year.
A view of the courtyard on the Bibby Stockholm vessel. Lack of risk assessments has led to a rise in violent incidents onboard.
“People are scared of something they can’t understand or control”
Whilst opposition appears to underlie the attitude towards asylum seekers in Bexhill, this is not the case in surrounding areas.
A ten minute train journey down the coast, is the town of Hastings. Hastings is home to Sanctuary Festival, set up to celebrate the integration of refugees into the local community.
Jane Grimshaw is the co-chair of Hastings Community of Sanctuary. She originally helped set up the festival to welcome participants of the Syrian resettlement scheme.
Jane stumbled into the charity sector. Back in 2015, herself and a few friends made a Facebook group to discuss the migrant crisis in Calais, and what they could do to help. Within a week the group had 600 members. Within a month, it had over 1000 members.
In a bid to help, Jane previously posted on the group, asking people to buy affordable tracksuit bottoms from Primark to send to Calais. A bemused Primark employee said they couldn’t stack the shelves fast enough!
Jane also coordinated a first-response team to meet refugees as the boats came in onto the beaches of Hastings. They would check shipping apps so they could track when French or English emergency response boats were called, and kept plastic boxes in the back of their cars filled with cereal bars and fleece blankets.
(Play to listen to Jane describe one of her first-response efforts)
Jane says she thinks part of the problem with the Northeye site is its location.
“It’s in a little village on the outskirts of Bexhill, and I mean, Bexhill is tiny anyway, Bexhill is a small town.”
“But, I think if they were to propose that being opened on the edge of an estate in Hastings, you may well get the same response.”
“It’s quite a scary thing, to have an unknown put into your community, and the rhetoric in the press is very negative and I think people are scared. Scared of something they can’t understand or control.”
“I find the rhetoric from the residents very upsetting but I understand where it comes from and it comes from a place of fear.”
“You’ve got to find common ground with people. You have to find the point that you meet and expand out at that. The common ground in Northeye is that nobody wants it.”
“It’s the wrong plan and it’s the wrong place”.
“We don’t want people living there, not because we don’t want them in our country but because the accommodation there is inhumane, unsuitable and I don’t think these camps work in any way.”
What now?
The Home Office proceeded with its large sites on the basis that they would cost less than hotels. But, the latest assessments of value for money suggest that when sunk costs are included, the four large sites will cost approximately £46 million more than using hotels.
They expected the refurbishment of the sites to be around £5 million each for Wethersfield in Essex and Scampton in Lincolnshire.
These costs have since increased to £49 million for Wethersfield, and £27 million for Scampton, which is yet to open.
Despite setbacks in their plans for their large-scale accommodation plans, the government have continued to close hotels. The Home Office proposed to have stopped using 140 of the approximately 400 hotels it was using to accommodate asylum seekers by the end of last month.
Campaigners warn there is not enough detention space
Nicola David says that the Home Office is facing an accommodation crisis.
“They are closing so many hotels. They’ve reduced the numbers at Scampton. They’ve reduced the numbers at Wethersfield. The Bibby Stockholm may or may not be renewed. These are poultry numbers of people, and we are talking about thousands and thousands of people coming.”
In the last seven days, 1107 migrants have crossed into the UK in small boats.
The Illegal Migration Act passed in summer of 2023 states that ‘most people removed under the act will be detained before they are removed’.
“The detention estate isn’t big enough. We’ve only got one for sure going ahead which is Bexhill. But, who knows when that will be, they’ve been surveying for a year. We can’t give them tents, we don’t have housing. We are going to have hundreds of thousands of people on the streets.”
The Home Office is now developing a longer term strategy outlining accommodation needs for the next ten years.
It stated that it considers the experience in setting up large scale accommodation sites to have been valuable, because it now has a more realistic idea of the time, costs and risks associated with accommodation.
Toxicology reports continue to be carried out at Northeye Barracks, and future plans for the site remain unclear.
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