Plans for rural asylum centres dropped
Proposals to place thousands of asylum seekers in rural accommodation centres have been dropped, Home Office officials have confirmed.
Former Home Secretary David Blunkett has said that the centres were a key part of the Government’s strategy to deal with would-be refugees.
But the plans have now been abandoned after ministers spent more than £1 million searching for potential sites for the network of centres, The Times reports.
The centres, designed to temporarily house asylum applicants while their claims are processed, have been strongly opposed by local residents living near the proposed sites.
Plans to base asylum processing centres in Worcestershire, Oxfordshire and Nottinghamshire were met with particularly strong opposition.
Critics of the plans argued that the presence of hundreds of mainly single men in rural areas would risk provoking racial tensions.
Just one centre to house 750 asylum seekers has been granted planning permission.
But according to the paper there is now doubt about whether the development on MoD land at Bicester, Oxfordshire will go ahead, due to concerns about the design of the building.
Immigration Minister Tony McNulty admitted that there are no plans to build any further centres for five years in a written statement to MPs.
A spokesman for the Home Office said the falling number of asylum seekers in the UK had led the department to rethink the plan.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis told The Times : “This shows what happens when the Government throws together thoughtless policies as a panic-stricken response to their failures.”
The number of asylum seekers fell by 17 per cent in the first quarter of this year, according to figures released by the Home Office last month.
