The UK’s ‘Conservative’ government will use a special provision in emergency legislation allowing it to ignore normal planning laws to build migrant camps in areas where locals are resisting them, a report claims.
Suella Braverman, once hailed as a red-meat Conservative with a genuine drive to tackle the migrant crisis impacting the United Kingdom, is due to use emergency legislation to force a migrant camp onto a rural community which has attempted to resist it.
Brexit leader and mass migration sceptic Nigel Farage greeted the claim with sardonicism, remarking that it was remarkable the one time the British government used emergency powers in response to the Channel crisis, it wasn’t to prevent arrivals, but rather to house them.
A protest sign against plans for a new asylum processing centre at MDP Wethersfield, a former Royal Air Force base, in Shalford, UK, on Monday, April 3, 2023. UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman said the government is exploring the use of land and sites and vessels to house migrants, as she defended her attempts to curb the flow of immigrants crossing the English Channel from France in small boats. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
WETHERSFIELD, ENGLAND – APRIL 01: Security staff stand at the main gate of the former air base with signs placed by protesters supporting their opposition to the base being used for asylum seekers on April 1, 2023 in Wethersfield, England. Minister for Immigration, Robert Jenrick MP, has announced that plans to house asylum seekers at RAF Wethersfield in Essex will go ahead. (Photo by Martin Pope/Getty Images)
The government’s attempt to force an asylum centre on a community next to a former Royal Air Force base in Essex will be challenged in court today. While such considerable building projects would normally have to go through the planning process — which gives locals and councils the ability to object to new development — the government is using the so-called Class Q powers, reports the Daily Telegraph.
Introduced in the Town and County Planning Order 2015, Class Q powers allows the government to build anything on land it owns without limit if it is to prevent or mitigate an emergency. The power is conditional, however, and only lasts for six months. According to the law the buildings and structures installed for the emergency must be removed by the time that six month period, and “the land is restored to its condition before the development took place”.
The Council, the report notes, will challenge the declaration because the migrant crisis has now been going on for so long it could hardly be considered an emergency. A spokesman for the local authority said a more common interpretation of the word would be an earthquake, not the result of long-term ongoing government failure.
The case comes amid a new grim milestone for the ongoing English Channel migrant crisis, with arrivals for the year to date cresting 5,000 individuals detected. While the number is considerable, arrivals by the Channel boat method are running slightly behind last year, as reported by the Press Association at the same point in 2022 arrivals were over 6,000.
Given the shift to small boats was a reaction to border crackdowns enacted by the government for the coronavirus making other more long-established and clandestine methods of sneaking into the United Kingdom more difficult, it is feasible boat migrants will tail off as the border situation returns to normal.
While pro-open-borders campaigners claim would-be-migrants only resort to clandestine entry because the UK has a border system, no matter how ineffective, it remains the case that the movement of illegal migrants presents an ongoing security risk to the country. So many clandestine migrants have arrived the government has been reduced to announcing an effective amnesty to clear the backlog as their systems and staff have not proven equal to the task of fully vetting all those who have already arrived.
And yet recent events have backed the value of vetting arrivals, with the revelation that 19 suspected terrorists have been caught sneaking into the United Kingdom on small boats.