The Home Office has dropped its plan to house up to 300 adult male asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks, an MOD training site in Inverness, after confirmation from a UK minister to Angus MacDonald, the local MP.

The decision ends a dispute that started when Highland Council was notified of the proposal on 27 October 2025 — the same day the Home Office announced it publicly. The council moved quickly: within weeks it sent a formal letter of concern to the Home Office, and later called for proper consultation on the plan. That consultation has now become unnecessary.

MacDonald, who represents the SNP in Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, said the plan "defies logic" and raised concerns about legal risks and costs. The BBC reported a minister's direct confirmation to him that the barracks would not be used for this purpose.

Practical problems with Cameron Barracks were clear from the start. The site sits in an urban area of the Highlands, making it harder for the Home Office to achieve its stated aim of "self-sufficient, contained accommodation" than would be the case at more isolated military sites. Legal risks — the kind MacDonald highlighted — stem from litigation and injunctions that have affected other large barracks conversions elsewhere in the UK, driving up costs in unpredictable ways.

This scheme fitted into a broader government strategy: use surplus or underused MOD sites to reduce dependence on hotels for housing asylum seekers, a shift ministers have repeatedly promised to make on cost grounds. Crowborough Training Camp in East Sussex opened on 22 January 2026 and by May 2026 held roughly 350 people, with plans to reach 540. That site is going ahead; Inverness is not.

The difference between the two cases is instructive. Crowborough is in England, where asylum accommodation policy sits at Westminster without the added layer of devolved (local) governance that applies in Scotland. Housing and support services in the Highlands involve both the Scottish Government and Highland Council in ways that a site in Sussex does not — asylum itself is a reserved power (handled by Westminster alone), but the infrastructure around it requires local cooperation. Health referrals, English language classes and wider support systems all depend on this partnership. Without it, large barracks housing can start to feel more like detention than accommodation.

Highland Council's sustained pressure over eight months — public statements, formal letters, requests for dialogue — seems to have influenced the decision, even if the Home Office will not explain its thinking in detail. The council had no power to veto the plan. What it had was a public voice, and it used it consistently.

MacDonald's language — that the plan "defies logic" — will be read in Westminster as a signal for future proposals. Any Home Office attempt to use an MOD site in a Scottish urban area now has an obvious precedent: Inverness was announced, opposed, and then shelved quietly. Ministers will need to weigh whether similar reactions would follow at other sites before making a public commitment — the reputational cost of a second reversal is higher than the first.

For the roughly 300 men who would have gone to Cameron Barracks, the practical result is likely more scattered accommodation or continued use of hotels — the very outcome the barracks scheme was designed to replace. The Home Office has not disclosed where capacity will come from instead.