They promised Crowborough a year and have handed residents half a decade – a lasting decision taken by a Labour Cabinet whose Prime Minister had already resigned before it was announced. The least Crowborough is owed now is the truth.
Imagine, for a moment, that it was at the end of your road. An asylum seekers camp, on the edge of your town, beside the woods where you walk. Several hundred men, strangers to the area, free to come and go, with little to fill their days. Picture it next to the school where your children are taught, or the park where they play, or the path you take home after dark. Perhaps the thought troubles you not at all. But if you cannot say, hand on heart, that you would welcome it without a second’s hesitation, then you already understand how the people of Crowborough have felt since the government took their Ministry of Defence training camp, turned out the army, air and Royal Marines cadets who had used it for generations, and opened it as an asylum accommodation site.
I ask you to begin there, with honesty, because honesty is precisely what this community has been denied. I am not writing to stir anger. Crowborough is a kind and decent town, and its people are neither extreme nor unwelcoming. They are simply tired, anxious, and weary of being told one thing while being shown another. As the Leader of East Sussex County Council, I believe they deserve a plain account of what has been done to them, and why it is wrong.
Here are the facts. The site is Crowborough Training Camp, a Ministry of Defence facility that for generations served the community as a home for the army, air and Royal Marines cadets. Before the pandemic it hosted some 150,000 cadet training days, and last year alone around 600 local boys and girls used it. In December the cadets were turned out. In January the Home Office began moving asylum seekers in. The community was told, in unequivocal terms, that this was a temporary measure lasting no more than twelve months. That assurance has now collapsed. Court papers revealed that two government departments had quietly agreed the site could remain in use until 2030, and in recent days that longer future was confirmed. A town promised a single year is now facing the better part of a decade.
And the true scale is greater than the headline figure suggests. The site holds up to 540 men at any one time, but it is designed to turn over, with groups moving on after a matter of weeks and new arrivals taking their place. Over four years, the number of people passing through one small market town will run not into the hundreds, but into the thousands. These are, by the Home Office’s own description, single men between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five. Many come from countries whose customs and attitudes, particularly towards women, differ sharply from our own. To say so is not prejudice. It is simply to acknowledge what any honest neighbour would wish to know.
The result has been a community pulled apart. Opinion in the town is bitterly divided, and that division is itself the clearest proof that this was the wrong decision. Some residents believe the camp is no place to house vulnerable people. Others believe a site that allows hundreds of men to roam a small town with nothing to do is no answer either. Yet they agree on the one thing that matters: a large residential asylum centre, on the edge of a quiet town and beside a protected forest, is in the wrong place. The only people who seem to think otherwise are the ministers who will never live beside it.
And here we arrive at the part that ought to trouble every reader, whatever their view on asylum. Consider how we order these things in a civilised society. If a neighbour wishes to build an extension, or a developer to raise an estate, or a company to change the use of a building, there is a process. Plans are submitted. Neighbours are notified. Objections are heard. The community has its say, and a decision is reached in the open. People may not always like the outcome, and they do not always agree with it, but they have been consulted, and that consent, freely given or fairly refused, is the foundation on which a democracy rests.
None of that happened here. The government changed the use of this site, from a military training camp into accommodation for hundreds of men, without submitting a single planning application. It reached instead for emergency powers, the so-called permitted development rights designed for genuine and urgent need, and in effect granted itself the permission it would never have dared seek from the community. The council was told, in plain terms, that this was a matter for the minister and the minister alone. A confidential briefing was given, secrecy was demanded, and a promise to consult the public properly was made and then broken. By the government’s own admission, consultation was owed in practice even where it was not required in law. It was simply not given.
Let me be clear about what that means, because it matters far beyond Crowborough. A profound and controversial change was forced upon a community that was given no voice, no notice and no say. That is not a quarrel about asylum. It is a question of how we govern ourselves. When a government can reach for emergency powers to impose whatever it likes on whomever it chooses, with no obligation to ask, no duty to listen and no consequence for breaking its word, then the protections every one of us relies upon, the right to be heard before our lives are altered, count for nothing. This strikes at the very heart of our democracy, and every reader should be uneasy at it, whether the site in question is a mile from their door or a hundred.
That brings me to the argument the government leans on most heavily: that this saves money. I would ask you to weigh that claim against its own figures. The Home Office says barracks are cheaper than hotels. Yet the cost at Crowborough has run at around £160 per person per night, against an average hotel cost of roughly £144. Before a single extra penny is counted, the camp is already dearer, not cheaper. The department’s own officials admitted to a committee of MPs this month that the true cost is “roughly the same” as hotels, and that is before the cost of converting the site is even included. At the comparable camp in Essex, those set-up costs alone came to some £105 million. The independent National Audit Office has found the whole programme is likely to cost tens of millions more than the hotels it is meant to replace.
Nor do those numbers carry the cost to us here in Sussex. Our police needed almost £800,000 in extra funding simply to manage the site, a sum the Police and Crime Commissioner has warned will not be the last. The health service has had to create an entirely separate provision for the camp, in a town whose nearest accident and emergency department is ten miles away along country roads. None of this appears in the figure ministers like to quote. Look at their own numbers, and the saving they speak of simply vanishes. This is not careful management of public money. It is the appearance of it, paid for by a community that was never asked.
Let me be equally clear about the people at the heart of this, for they are too often forgotten in the noise. Some who reach our shores are fleeing genuine danger, and a decent country offers them refuge. I do not question that, and nor should anyone. But compassion and common sense are not enemies. We can hold both. The overwhelming majority of those crossing the Channel in small boats have already passed through France, and through other safe countries before it, each bound by the very same refugee conventions we are. A genuine search for safety does not depend on reaching one particular country across one particular stretch of sea. A serious system would deter that perilous journey, not advertise an open door at the end of it. The deepest failure of the present approach is that it is neither firm nor humane. It deters no one, it serves no one, and it leaves towns like Crowborough to bear what follows.
And we are entitled to ask why it is always towns like this one. Of the five sites the government has now chosen to extend or create, not one sits in the constituency of a senior minister who took the decision. They fall, time and again, on rural communities far from those who sign the orders. Meanwhile, in the government’s own programme to save money, large public buildings within a short walk of Downing Street stand empty or are being cleared out. If these sites are as benign as ministers insist, here is a fair question: why are they never proposed where the decision-makers themselves live and work? Why not the vacant government offices in the shadow of Parliament? I suspect we all know the answer. It is far easier to push the problem out of sight, to a quiet and non-Labour corner of England, than to face it on your own doorstep. If a policy is fair, it is fair everywhere. If it would be unthinkable in Westminster, we may reasonably ask why it is asked of Crowborough.
There is one further point I cannot pass over. This decision has been taken by a government with no settled leader and no clear mandate, in the very week it began the search for a new Prime Minister. By long convention, an administration in that position holds back from binding the country to major and lasting commitments until its authority has been renewed. To tie Crowborough to four more years at this of all moments is not the act of a confident government.
Let us be honest, too, about what Crowborough really is. It is not a solution to anything. It is a place to put the anger that built up around asylum hotels, moved out of sight so that ministers could claim those hotels were closing. The underlying problem, a system that cannot control who arrives or decide their claims with any speed, has not been touched. The camp is not progress. It is a dressing placed over a wound that no one has treated.
And it is being inflicted on us by a cabinet on its way out of the door. An administration that has lost its leader, and is days from losing its grip on office altogether, has chosen this moment to bind this town to four more years of a policy it cannot defend. There is something almost reckless in it, a government with nothing left to lose, doing lasting harm to a community that did nothing to deserve it, and pitting neighbour against neighbour as it goes. History will not record this as a difficult decision taken well. It will record it as a small town used as cover for a national failure.
It does not have to be this way, and the alternative is not complicated. Other countries have shown that the dangerous trade in small boats can be broken when arrivals are properly and securely managed rather than waved through. Serious measures to that end have been set out by others, and some have already been adopted across the political divide. Everyone, without exception, deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. But dignity does not require an open camp on the edge of a residential town. There is no reason on earth that Crowborough could not be a secured and closed facility, and every reason to believe that doing so would cost less than the present folly of tracking hundreds of men as they come and go, and ferrying them around the county at the public’s expense.
Consider the absurdity of what we have now. The site is closed to the public, yet open to those it houses. Local people may not set foot on the land that sits at the heart of their own town, while its residents are free to wander wherever they please. The only function the security on that gate appears to serve is to let people out, not to keep the situation in hand. That is not control. It is the precise opposite of it, and the people of Crowborough see it plainly every day.
So this is my message to the ministers responsible, and to whoever inherits this mess in the autumn. Come to Crowborough. Sit with its residents. Look them in the eye and explain how this serves them, how it saves the money you claim, and how it could not have been done more sensibly somewhere else. Then do three things. Set out a genuine plan to end the use of this site for good. In the meantime, lock it down and run it as the secure facility it should always have been, rather than an open door with a guard who only shows people the way out. And above all, stop pretending that any of this amounts to getting a grip on the problem.
I will not let the communities I serve become the quiet corner of England where a failed policy is left to run its course out of sight. Crowborough was promised the truth, and is still waiting for it. It was promised a year, and handed the best part of a decade. It was told this would save money, and shown figures that prove the opposite. Enough is enough. It is time, at long last, for this government to be serious about being serious, and to solve the problem it has spent so long pretending it has already fixed.
Andy Woolley
Leader of Reform UK East Sussex Group and Leader of East Sussex County Council
June 2026
