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Military sites may be used temporarily to house people seeking asylum as Keir Starmer is “absolutely determined” to end the use of hotels earlier than planned, a senior cabinet minister has said.
John Healey, the defence secretary, said military planners were looking at possible sites for accommodation on defence bases, as the prime minister wants to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers sooner than the promised date of 2029.
Healey told Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “With the Home Office, I have been putting military planners into their border command and into their planning for the future.
“We are looking at the potential use of military and non-military sites for temporary accommodation for the people who come across on these small boats that may not have a right to be here or need to be processed rapidly before we can decide whether or not they should say or whether or not we deport them, like we have done in record numbers over the last year.”
Speaking later on the BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Healey was pressed on whether the military could play a bigger role in patrolling the border. He did not give a clear answer but suggested that military bases and help with planning was the extent of the army’s work at the moment.
Starmer has moved to toughen up his policy on the issue of small boats as Reform has a double-digit poll lead and continues to attack the government on its failure to meet its pledge of smashing the gangs. There have also been protests outside hotels, including in Epping in Essex, where discontent erupted following the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by a man seeking asylum.
This week, Starmer has changed direction by bringing in Shabana Mahmood as home secretary, replacing Yvette Cooper. The government is also looking at the idea of trying to change the application of the European convention on human rights’s right to family life in order to enable more deportations of those it believes have no right to be in the UK.
Reform UK said over the weekend at its conference it would stop small boat crossings of people seeking asylum within two weeks of taking office. Nigel Farage clarified on Sunday that he meant he would pass legislation within two weeks to stop judges preventing deportations of those who entered the UK by illegal means.
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s head of policy, denied claims that asylum seekers would be housed in shipping containers, saying the party would use “purpose-built modular steel structures”.
Speaking on Sky News on Sunday, Zia Yusuf defended proposals for rapid-build detention facilities, citing international examples. “We can look around the world at where things have worked and worked well,” he said. “President Trump stood up 3,000 detention beds in eight days. That was this year in the state of Florida – using steel modular structures.”
