The government has cancelled plans to house up to 300 asylum seekers at an army training site in Inverness, Scotland, after the local council and MP objected to the idea.

The Home Office announced the scheme on 27 October 2025, the same day it told Highland Council about it. The council quickly said no, sending a formal letter of concern within weeks. After eight months of disagreement, a minister has confirmed to Angus MacDonald, the local MP, that Cameron Barracks will not be used for this purpose.

MacDonald, an SNP politician, said the plan "defies logic". He worried about legal problems and costs. The BBC reported the minister's confirmation directly to him.

Why was the barracks a bad idea? The site is in a town area of the Highlands, not isolated enough for the government's plan to run the place self-sufficiently — residents would need local support services, which are complicated to arrange. There were also legal risks: courts have blocked or delayed similar schemes at other military sites elsewhere in the UK, and that costs money and time.

The government had been trying to move asylum seekers out of hotels and into spare military sites to save money. Another site, Crowborough Training Camp in East Sussex, opened in January 2026 and is working well. That one is going ahead. Inverness is not.

Why did one succeed and one fail? Crowborough is in England. Scotland has its own government that handles housing and local services, which means anything that happens there needs agreement from Edinburgh and from local councils. The asylum seekers themselves come under Westminster law (that is not devolved), but all the support around them — health, language classes, housing help — depends on Scottish cooperation. Highland Council said no, and stuck to it.

The council did not have a legal right to block the plan. But it had a voice, and it used it month after month in public statements and formal letters.

What happens next? The government now needs to find somewhere else for these 300 men. They will probably end up spread across different places or staying in hotels longer — which is what the barracks scheme was supposed to fix. The Home Office has not said where the new places will be.

There is also a signal here for future plans. Any time the government tries to use a military site for asylum seekers in a Scottish town, it will remember that Inverness was announced, challenged, and quietly dropped. Ministers will think twice before doing this again.