What's next for airbase housing asylum seekers?

The Home Office has announced its plans to look at continuing to use a former RAF base to house migrants in rural north Essex.

MDP Wethersfield, near Halstead, has been used to house single male migrants since 2023 and now the government is looking to press ahead with plans to increase the number of people accommodated there from about 800 to 1,220.

The site had been earmarked to shut next year, but on Thursday the government said it wanted to extend the use of the site beyond 2027.

What do the people who are living near what is believed to be the UK's largest asylum centre think of the expansion?

Peter Harris, Reform UK leader of Essex County Council, said: "They [the migrants] absolutely should be detained.

"We don't know who they are and what their intentions are. What we must do is leave the European Convention on Human Rights and we must detain and then deport these illegal migrants who have come to this country," Harris told BBC Essex presenter Sonia Watson.

He said the presence of the asylum seekers had caused "great concern" among residents.

"If those gates were actually kept closed, I don't think this would be as big an issue," he added.

According to the Home Office, migrants at MDP [Ministry of Defence Police] Wethersfield were being provided with a shuttle bus three times a day to Braintree, Colchester and Chelmsford.

Other transport was also being provided to help those asylum seekers to access health services not provided on site, or to access volunteering opportunities, it added.

Maria Wilby, from Colchester-based Refugee, Asylum Seeker & Migrant Action, said: "The people currently being hosted in these centres are seeking asylum. They have a legal right to make such a claim.

"They [the migrants] can only be detained once all legal routes have been explored. Wethersfield is not a detention centre.

"Once we start choosing which law to follow, we all face losing rights and freedoms we hold dear."

She added that limiting the human rights of asylum seekers would be a "real slippery slope".

"Those human rights don't just apply to asylum seekers. If we start taking away human rights it will be a very, very short time before everybody's human rights are affected," she said.

"We would be losing the rights our forefathers fought for in this country, the right for people fleeing things to find safety in another country."

Wilby said using dispersal accommodation, such as houses of multiple occupancy instead of military sites, was favourable.

MDP Wethersfield is in the Braintree parliamentary constituency.

James Cleverly, its MP and a former Conservative home secretary, said that although the site was opened when his party was in government, there had been a "cap on numbers and there was an end date".

"The Labour Party, in government, have smashed the cap and now the end date," he said.

"That is completely wrong and I am going to look at avenues, legal [and] political to get this site closed down."

The Fields Association describes itself as a residents' group "formed to respond to inappropriate and unsympathetic overdevelopment of the north Essex countryside".

Alan MacKenzie, its chairman, said he was "very disappointed" with the government's announcement to extend the use of the site.

He said he had been campaigning for five years to "get the airbase back into community hands" ever since the government had the initial plan of creating a prison there.

"We were hoping the airbase would be turned to the community post-April 2027 when the special development order ran out," he said.

"While they are saying they're reducing the numbers [of asylum seekers] in the hotels, they certainly haven't sorted out the numbers enough to be able to shut down the asylum centre at the airbase.

"Everyone around here is disappointed in that."

Alex Norris, Minister for Border Security and Asylum at the Home Office, previously said: "We are moving asylum seekers into ex-military sites that are a far cry from the hotels the last government left us with.

"This is a system being brought back under control – and we will not stop until the job is done."

The BBC has contacted the Home Office for further comment.

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