Migrants could be moved to military sites as PM tells new Cabinet ‘go up a gear’

Asylum seekers could be temporarily moved to military sites after Sir Keir Starmer told his new-look Cabinet to “go up a gear” amid rising numbers of small boat crossings in the Channel.

The Prime Minister has used a major reshuffle to make wide-ranging ministerial changes at the Home Office as he seeks to harden the Government’s immigration policy, with human rights reform now also on the table.

Speaking to broadcasters on Sunday, John Healey said military planners were being drafted into border command, while ministers were considering using defence sites to house asylum seekers.

“I think you’ll start to see Keir Starmer insist that dealing with the small boats, solving the illegal immigration crisis, is part of the jobs of the whole of Government, not just the Home Office,” the Defence Secretary told Sky’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips show.

He said part of this would involve looking at moving asylum seekers into “temporary” accommodation on military sites, but did not confirm a date for when such transfers might take place.

The scale of the challenge facing new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was illustrated on Saturday, when an estimated 1,000 people arrived by small boat in Britain, and French authorities said 24 people were rescued while trying to cross the Channel.

One Government source said “nothing is off the table” for Ms Mahmood as she assumes her new brief and she has signalled a willingness to look at human rights reforms within domestic law.

Ministers want to speed up plans to end the costly use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of the Parliament after they became a focal point for anti-migrant protests over the summer.

Two former military sites, Napier Barracks in Kent and RAF Wethersfield in Essex, are already being used as asylum accommodation after being opened under the previous Tory government.

The Napier site in Folkestone is slated to be returned to the Ministry of Defence in September, although its use by the Home Office was previously extended amid increased small boat crossings.

Mr Healey said on Sunday: “We’re starting to renew, and what Keir Starmer has done is put a new team in place and said to us all, ‘you’ve got to go up a gear to demonstrate that Government can deliver for people’.”

He added: “(Sir Keir) wants Shabana Mahmood, who’s done so well getting to grips with the prisons crisis, to do that in the Home Office.”

The shake-up comes as Sir Keir faces pressure in the polls from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, who pledged at their party conference to “stop the boats” within two weeks of entering government.

He rowed back on the claim within 24 hours, telling broadcasters in a series of interviews that the party would instead stop the boats within two weeks of immigration legislation being passed to enable it to do so.

Reform’s head of policy Zia Yusuf defended his party’s stance on deportations on Sunday after Mr Farage suggested women could be deported back to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

“Why were the Tories OK with thousands of military-age men from Afghanistan? That’s why mothers were protesting in Epping – because it was British women that were subjected to that very culture,” he said.

“You just laid out the Afghanistan culture that British people are being subjected to.”

Campaigners criticised the move to expand the use of military sites, saying the policy had been a failure.

“The answer to failed asylum hotels is not failed asylum camps,” chief executive of the Refugee Council Enver Soloman said.

“The solution is faster, fairer decisions and safe housing in communities, so refugees can work, study and rebuild their lives.”

Meanwhile, the Conservatives accused Reform of copying the former Tory government’s migration policies.

“All Reform are doing now – a few weeks ago they were talking about towing the boats back to France and they realised they couldn’t do that,” party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said.

“And all their plans now are a copycat – exactly the plans that we had in the last government.”