Government presses on with former military base asylum sites as Piddington villagers stage symbolic referendum
The Home Office is pressing ahead with plans to house asylum-seekers on former military bases, including a site near the Oxfordshire village of Piddington, despite vocal local opposition that has seen the 400-strong community stage a symbolic independence referendum. Home Office minister Anna Turley confirmed the government's continued commitment to the policy, citing the on-site facilities and the "more contained" nature of Ministry of Defence properties as justification for their use (BBC News).
The Piddington site, which would accommodate more than 1,000 asylum-seekers, has become a flashpoint. The village's parish council vice-chairman, Mike Nixon, has been among those leading local resistance. In an unconventional act of protest, Piddington held a symbolic referendum asking residents whether they wished to remain part of the United Kingdom, a gesture underscoring the depth of feeling in a community that would see its population more than tripled by the proposed facility (BBC News).
Piddington is one of three former military sites proposed in June 2026 for asylum accommodation. The others are a former RAF base in Barnham, Suffolk, and RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire. Together, they represent the latest phase in a strategy the government has been pursuing since at least March 2023, when Reuters reported that ministers were preparing to move migrants out of hotels and into military bases or disused ferries (Reuters).
Two former military sites are already operational. RAF Wethersfield in Essex and Crowborough Training Camp in East Sussex are both housing asylum-seekers. Wethersfield's role has expanded: in June 2026, the Home Office informed Braintree Council that the site's standard operational capacity would permanently increase from 800 to 1,245 places (Braintree District Council). Defence Secretary John Healey, speaking in September 2025, indicated that further military sites could be brought into use, pointing to MDP Wethersfield and Napier Barracks in Kent as examples of sites already serving that function (BBC News).
Alongside the military-site strategy, the government continues to exit hotel contracts. On a Wednesday this month, ministers announced that a further 13 hotels across England used for asylum accommodation had been closed. The Metropole hotel in Blackpool is among those no longer in use. The Home Office said the 13 hotels had been "exited and handed back to local communities, ready to reopen their doors to the public" (Home Office).
The accommodation power underpinning this approach took effect from 2 June 2026, when the Home Office began using a statutory power to provide accommodation to destitute, or soon-to-be destitute, asylum-seekers, as set out in its published allocation policy (gov.uk). The Home Office has framed the military-site strategy as a means of ending reliance on hotels, with strict on-site security assured at the new facilities (Home Office, Facebook).
The policy is not without political competition. On 3 August 2026, Reform UK proposed a military-led operation to stop asylum-seeker arrivals entirely, a markedly harder line than the government's use of military sites for accommodation (Reuters). Protest against housing asylum-seekers in former military properties has been a recurring feature of the landscape, with demonstrations recorded in England as recently as January 2026 (Reuters).
The broader context here is one of a government trying to demonstrate progress on two fronts simultaneously: reducing the hotel bill, which has long been politically toxic, and doing so through a model, large-scale containment on former military land, that generates its own controversies. The hotel closures provide ministers with tangible deliverables they can point to. The military-site expansion, by contrast, trades one set of local grievances for another, relocating opposition from hotel-dependent communities to rural villages like Piddington.
For Westminster watchers, the trajectory is clear even if the politics remain unsettled. The Wethersfield capacity uplift, the June proposal for three further military sites, and the steady trickle of hotel exits all point to an institutional commitment to the dispersed-accommodation model. Whether that commitment survives sustained local resistance, judicial challenge, or a shift in arrivals numbers is a separate question. What is not in question is that the government, for now, intends to hold this line.
